The MFA Workshop Experience, Part Two

Giving Critiques

In an MFA workshop, you will give critiques — often for two or three pieces — every week. This consists not only in taking home a fellow student’s printed work and writing your critique down, but in a critique discussion with the rest of your class. I don’t know about anyone else, but I often worried more about giving critiques than receiving them. What makes a good writing critique? I wanted to be helpful, and didn’t want to misinterpret my fellow students’ work, be too hard or, because of worries about being to hard, be too easy on it. I worried about giving advice to people whose skills were more advanced than mine. I worried about telling people I liked that I didn’t like their stories so much. I realize now that those are the natural worries that can, if used properly, result in giving a helpful critique. These are the questions I kept in mind as I read for critique. It’s risky trying to guess at authorial intent, but the text can give you clues about what the author is trying to effect and can lead you a better reading of their piece.

• Is it humorous or serious? A little of both? Once you answer this question, you can determine if something is working as humor, or if something is unintentionally funny in a serious piece, or if the author is achieving the kind of mordant humor s/he’s going for.

• Who is the intended audience? It isn’t always you. This one requires a little imagination and empathy. You have to put aside your reading preferences and work on determining if teenage girls or older men, or who ever you think the audience is, might enjoy the piece. Acknowledge your limitations as a reader to the author, but don’t use it as an excuse not to try to give a helpful critique.

• What kind of style does the author have? It’s probably not the same as yours. Don’t try to make their style into something it isn’t. Try to disregard your preference for well-polished gleaming Fitzgerald-esque prose to acknowledge that the author writes in a grittier style. How does that style work with the story’s or essay’s theme? (See next item.) Keep the style in mind when you suggest that a certain word choice might be infelicitous or if a sentence my be restructured.

• If it’s a creative essay, is there a central idea you can describe after reading it? If it’s a short story, is there a theme? If you’re in graduate school, you should know all about theses and themes now — more often than not, in literature classes you are writing essays with a theses about other writers’ themes. The work you produce and that your fellow students produce should stand up to the same kind of critical scrutiny. Don’t write an academic essay about your fellow students’ work, but use the skills you have to work out the thesis or theme and determine if the story or essay is clear enough and supporting it. Or is the piece too on-the-nose, laying out and underlying its thesis or theme in a way that is unsubtle and repetitive? As you can see from the length of what I’ve written about this question, this is an element I think is very important and that was my favorite part of giving critiques. You have to ask the author, “What are you trying to say?” and help them make their statement more clearly or with more nuance.

When you write your critique and when you contribute to the critique discussion in class, be sure to include what your interpretation of tone, style, audience, and theme are. If you can’t answer these questions after reading a piece a couple of times, that’s probably a problem with the piece itself. Note to the author what gave you trouble in determining what kind of story or essay the piece is supposed to be.

For fiction and a lot of kinds of creative nonfiction, there are elements besides style and theme that make up a piece: plot, characters and dialogue, and setting.

• Plot is my particular weakness, and supposedly one of MFA writers in general, who don’t tend to write outside-conflict kind of stories. Look for a central conflict in the same way you would look for a theme. Is it too subtle? Too obvious? Is it resolved too easily? Not well enough? Did you get a sense of tension and resolution as you read it? If so, there’s probably a plot. If not, there probably isn’t. How can the conflict be brought out?

• Characters and dialogue are an area where writers can get a little self-indulgent. We talk about our characters like real people sometimes and can get pretty attached to them. This might make for a tendency to dwell too much on certain minutiae of their personalities or to have dialogue that was fun to write but does little to contribute to the story. Or sometimes a character is so clear to the author that s/he doesn’t make that character living enough to the reader. Characters and dialogue, like theme, can also be too on-the-nose. If a character’s emotional arc is too neat, and characters always say exactly what they are thinking, there will be no tension in the story. (I don’t need to really get into simple stuff like writing naturalistic dialogue and avoiding “As you know, Bob” exposition, right?)

• Setting is not given as much importance as it used to in fiction, I think. You get the whole layouts of villages and particular farms in George Eliot or Thomas Hardy novels, but I think the contemporary tendency in non-genre fiction is for a certain generic quality to setting, like a really simple stage where the audience fills in the details or where the details of a room don’t matter so much. However, you should still get a sense that the characters in a story occupy a space that has boundaries and a few characteristics, and they should interact with that space.

The guidelines for giving critiques are pretty straightforward, and the first one shouldn’t even have to be articulated, but nevertheless:

• Don’t be mean. Did you think the story was terrible? Like, really, really awful? Try to tell the author that it just wasn’t working for you and why. Just saying that it sucks or was bad or marking up the story with a whole lot of red ink is not helpful.

• Don’t be a bore. This refers to the in-class critique session especially. If you’ve made your point, don’t keep repeating it. If someone disagrees with your interpretation or take on a story, you can reply to them, but don’t keep on going on with it after that. The critique session is about someone’s story, not about your prowess as a literary critic — put your ego aside for the sake of your classmate’s writing.

• Don’t dominate. This is kind of the same as the last one. A critique session is for open, fluid discussion, not for you to pontificate about what you think. Give other people a chance to talk and be respectful while they give their opinions.

I often thought during grad school that giving critiques was as helpful, if not moreso, to my own writing than to the people whom I was critiquing, just as I feel studying literature makes me a better writer. When you seek out the problem spots in other people’s writing, unless you’re hopelessly arrogant, it makes you more attuned to the problems in your own writing. You can begin to apply your critiquing eye to your own work, and it will only benefit from that attention.