Writers and their "friends"

I don't like sharing my writing with my regular friends. Too often I find that they try so hard to be kind that you can't get any useful criticism anyway. Or they don't read your genre. Or they say something that gets past your 'thick' skin and you can't convince them that it was fine!

Actually I never share with friends, most of the stuff above comes from having tried to share my writing with my husband, who I have to accept just isn't really interested. He tries, but it's not just his thing.

However a friend of mine did ask to see my writing a few weeks back. Out of interest, I thought. Since then he's messaged me to say he's got some thoughts about my stories, but would rather tell me face-to-face... I said 'oh don't worry, in text is fine, I do a lot of critiquing just send it over'. But he said no.

I'm one of those people who'd rather get critiques from the safety of my screen than in person. Especially when in person means from one of my friends!

I am introverted and anti-social though...
 
Stephen Palmer said:
I couldn't agree more.
Click to expand...
Yes, a great article.

Not sure why this thread morphed into review angst, but review gerrymandering is a real problem and writers should not be perpetuating it. However, it won't stop. It's been going on for a long time. I like to think I can spot it a mile off. (shrugs)

mistri said:
but would rather tell me face-to-face...
Click to expand...
Oh, dear! That sounds scary. I hope that meeting went well. :(
 
Stephen Palmer said:
I couldn't agree more.
Click to expand...
It appears I've already "liked" that article - so I'll have to settle for sharing it with my many writers groups this time around...

(as soon as I finish teaching for the day, that is; I'm currently waiting for my last class in a Spanish bar where The Worst Album of Classic Rock Covers In Human History is thrilling my ears with awful)
 
I don't think it makes sense to have a normal bell curve on reviews between 1 and 5, for the simple reason that almost no deservedly 1 star books should have made it past the publishing process. Like Yelp restaurant reviews, no restaurant remains open to continue to be reviewed if it can't average 3 stars or better, which means that quite a few reviews must be 4 or 5 stars to make up for the 1 star reviews the place gets.

A normal distribution of reviews is only going to occur if the items being reviewed were compulsory - like when an English class must turn in a story from every student. Though self publishing is going to make the distribution more like that of an English class.
 
Last edited:
RX-79G said:
I don't think it makes sense to have a normal bell curve or reviews between 1 and 5, for the simple reason that almost no deservedly 1 star books should have made it past the publishing process.
Click to expand...
I think you meant on there, right? Or are you saying "it doesn't make sense to have reviews between 1 and 5"? In any case, reviews aren't about what did or did not "deservedly" get published, they just reflect a given reader's entirely subjective response to what they read.
RX-79G said:
A normal distribution of reviews is only going to occur if the items being reviewed were compulsory - like when an English class must turn in a story from every student.
Click to expand...
I don't think this is correct (and I'm not sure what "compulsory" has to do with the maths). There are hardly any universally loved (or loathed) works of art, so we should only expect the true quality outliers to seriously skew their curves; most would naturally attract some positive, some negative and some neutral reactions. That's still true for those few books generally regarding as masterpieces, though less so -- but that's what makes the artificiality of the Only-5-Stars-For-Me-Please brigade stand out.
RX-79G said:
Though self publishing is going to make the distribution more like that of an English class.
Click to expand...
I don't see how self-publishing impacts the debate. There have always been good, bad and average books (by whatever metric the world at large judges such things). Traditional publishing has been swimming in them for decades.
 
I'm going to have to disagree. I have bumped into people on writing forums who can't write grammatically correct sentences and the quality of the prose, ideas, character and story structure are so awful that no publisher would ever touch it. That's a 1. Not a 1 that an okay book sometimes gets because the occasional reader doesn't like it, but a true 1 because nearly anyone would find it awful and only give it a 2 at best.

But since the process of publishing is going to elminate the very worst possible fiction, the average distribution of stars is unlikely to ever be centered on 3. Yelp reviews average 3.8. Just as truly bad restaurants don't last, truly bad books don't get published, read or reviewed. It's a classic selection bias problem since the worst "reviews" happen behind closed doors by the publisher.
 
Just to illustrate what I'm talking about, I went to Amazon and chose Military Science Fiction Paperbacks, and arranged by average rating, yielding 300 books. 244 had reviews. There were reams of books that had nearly 5 starts, but only 1 book that had a 2 star rating, and nothing below 2. In fact, there were only 3 books of 244 that were below 3 stars. The distribution of these published books was nowhere near a normal distribution between 1 and 5.
 
Last edited:
I agree the "normal" in this instance should probably skew higher than a flat 3 (sorry if that's a mathematical contradiction in terms, I wouldn't know). I guess I mean "average".

I just looked at my Goodreads stats for my first book:

167 ratings, average 3.87

5 star : 26% (44)
4 star : 43% (73)
3 star : 22% (37)
2 star : 6% (11)
1 star : 1% (2)

That's not bad at all, but it's still a hell of a long way off the 4.x averages you often see on Amazon.
 
PeteMC said:
167 ratings, average 3.87
Click to expand...
Exactly what might strike me as a plausible rating for a strong first-time novel (and for a generally "good" book, for that matter, first time or not).

@RX-79G, I take your point that a pure bell curve composed of 1- to 5-star ratings probably isn't what we'll ever see. But even if a skewed curve that leans towards the higher end was "the review-curve norm", the gimme-5's would still stand out as an unlikely spike.
 
Can I just say what interesting reading all this is. I totally failed my statistics module in maths, so I am learning lots! :)
 
From the article:

There is in mathematics a thing called the normal distribution. The normal distribution in its most general form says: under some conditions (which include finite variance), the averages of random variables independently drawn from independent distributions converge in distribution to the normal, that is, become normally distributed when the number of random variables is sufficiently large. This leads to the so-called bell curve. In other words, this is a statistical variation occurring in the natural world and elsewhere, describing the average distribution of variables. A distribution skewed in one direction – for instance a shed-load of 5* reviews – is not normal.
Click to expand...

That's not what the normal distribution says. That's the central limit theorem. The central limit thereom is the reason statistics can often use the normal distribution, even when they don't know how the actual variables are distributed. Or rather, the central limit theorem is important because we do not expect certain variables to have a normal distribution.

An easy example is throwing dice. You throw dice five times and calculate the means. The means will eventually distribute according to the bell curve, even though we know that we can't assume a normal distribution every time. Note that if you don't work with means and just throw dice a lot, you'll approach a uniform distribution (i.e. you should get all the numbers about equally often).

Note that you can also look at the distribution of stars that a reviewer gives. That would be an interesting study, too. For example, in this very thread, Nila has outlined her postion on reviews: she only reviews books she likes (***+). Depending on how frequent such policies are, this could account for a systematic distortion. Similarly, if a lot of people only post reviews when they had an extreme reaction, you'd get a disproportionate number of *s and *****s.

Note that those distortions are every bit as systematic as the five-star swap. It's just that they're also honest.
 
N. E. White said:
(Gasp!) I'm skewing the system.

I will start to rate all the books I read. I may not review all of 'em, but I'll rate all of them.
Click to expand...

You don't need to. The system isn't just skewed; it's screwed (all sorts of people doing who knows what). (Luckily, it's not meant to be science, anyway.)
 
I've posted a few pieces here and there. Usually I have no idea if anyone actually looks or reads anything I've posted, so it's a complete surprise when I receive a comment, let alone a review. When I do critiques, I try to remember to say what I liked and why first before diving into any problems, I think it helps to defuse the defensiveness we all feel when someone reads our work.

I try not to inflict my writing on friends and family, they may confuse themselves with the characters.
 
I started writing when I was in High School 13 years ago. At first I just published my works (mostly fanfiction) on the internet and received a pretty good feedback from young folks like myself at the time. In 2005 I decided to join some writers contest. To do my best I offered my parents to read the short story I wanted to participate with. They were pretty exited but made few notes about things they couldn’t understand or viewed as wrong or inappropriate. I respected their opinion and made changes. The contest went very well for me so every time I wrote something I showed it to my parents and sometimes even greatparents.

Everything went great but many years later I noticed I hardly have any readers. People who read my stories for some reason always said they were good and nice but not enjoyable. Not something exiting you wants to read in your free time. They were more like school lessons or sermon lacking any thrill.

And then it stroked me. I finally understood what went wrong. I started to write something my parents would like in a genre they wouldn’t read in their leisure time if I weren’t its author. It was like making horror movie appealing for preteen audience or Marvel universe comics interesting to older generation.

So listening to the opinion of my family members made me lost contact with my actual readers. And they weren’t my readers in a first place. They were my parents.

I hope this lesson will be useful for people in same situation.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Sponsors


We try to keep the forum as free of ads as possible, please consider supporting SFFWorld on Patreon


Your ad here.
Back
Top