How about this? by
N. Harmonik
on 2016-05-19 01:47:00 UTC
Reply
[Dear badfic writer, the rules of writing are STILL not arbitrary!
Why is Shakespeare's poetry enjoyed by people everywhere, while someone else's silly doggerel about their cat hasn't even been published in the school paper?
Why is it that people commonly criticize "Twilight" as being poorly written, but not "Dracula"?
Why can your high school literature teacher justify giving you a bad grade for poor writing, even if your grammar and spelling are fine?
The fact is, people judge each others' writing all the time. Book critics make a living from doing it.
If you try to make brownies with rhubarb jelly instead of eggs, we have every right to (a) not eat it, or (b) if we do, say we don't like it. If you try to hold a house together with glue instead of nails, we have every right to laugh at you when it falls apart and point out that nails would have held it together better, so you don't make the same mistake again.
Just like the rules of brownie-making say you need eggs and the rules of house-building say you need nails, the rules of writing say you need SPaG, a coherent plot, and a grasp of characterization. This is for a reason: it makes your story hold together and appeal to more people, just like eggs make brownies hold together and taste good; just like nails make a house hold together and not come crashing down on your head. It is not merely a matter of opinion.
Sure, some of what's good or bad is pretty subjective. If we're targeting your story, though, we're not doing it because it's mostly competent and we just don't like the direction it's heading. We're doing it because it contains glaring problems in the building blocks of the story: characterisation (especially in characters from canon), world-building, sentence structure, plotting and pacing, among others. These aren't subjective; they're objective standards, and to get our attention, you need to have failed them pretty hard.]
At present, probably a bit of a mish-mash.
PS: Which section would this go under? "Excuses, excuses"?