Following on the same vein from a previous post, I’m going to talk about critics.
Now, I love every critic who puts themselves out there, allows themselves to be spammed by random people who often have no inkling of what manners are, and spend hours trying to help people out. That just sounds like an awesome person, right?
However, not all critics are equal. Actually, let’s make a scale of critics.
At one end are the critics who misspell their ads but have hilariously bright banners, ask for payment, are proud to announce that they have a junior-high level of English, and call themselves “critiques” all at the same time. The other end has people who actually have some sort of education or experience working with the English language, call themselves “critics”, have no misspellings in their ads, and often have a simple or typed up banner. Did I mention they tend provide free critiques too?
So it breaks down to something like this:
←------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------>
Prepubescent fan-seekers vs Awesome people who actually want to help you write better
(I have a feeling this scale will end up really skewed when I publish it. Oh well.)
Wattpad works on a basic free-market economy principle. The more you like something, the more you promote it, the more popular it will become. There are variations to this due to the algorithm used but the the principle is that if your product (i.e. book) has the ability to be popular, it will become popular.
So shouldn’t the same apply to things like critics and critiques? The better the critic, the better the critique, the more you want to hear from that individual.
Theoretically, in the future, we could have a critic thread where only awesome critics go (as chosen by the people receiving critiques). While this may not be true at the moment, in principle, this is absolutely possible on Wattpad.
What does this mean? How do we make the "awesome critic" thread a possiblilty?
Pick and choose your critics. Check out their stories, previous critiques, thread comments -- anything. The better you know what to expect from someone, the more you can find their critiques helpful to you. Just randomly choosing a critic on the principle that their banner is pretty and shiny really won’t get you the stuff you need to know to become a better writer.
Let's not forget that choosing a critic based on merit gives them the recognition they deserve and makes them feel legen-wait-for-it-and-hope-you're-not-lactose-intolerant-dary.
