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I really need to come up with a better way to document my reading habits than the "book reviews" tag. Maybe I need to actually use my goodreads account or something. Because sometimes you just don't want to do a review!

But I will. The theme of this review: Lawrence Block's "Telling Lies For Fun And Profit" is a perfectly decent book except for two things.

a) This is stuff I learned when I was nineteen. This kind of book was once necessary, before the web, but now everyone and their brother blogs about the harrowing process of writing and publishing fiction. And the thing is, it's basically just a collection of well-arranged columns he wrote for a magazine, so it's not a lot of new ground even when it was first published.

b) He doesn't apparently know about fanfic, and he bases a lot of his teaching on the idea that writing isn't fun or something anyone would ever do for free. Which...bzuh?

In chapter eight or nine he said that it's a good idea to stop reading books that you don't enjoy or aren't getting anything from. So I stopped reading. And that sounds so catty, but I don't need to be told "read a lot" or "make other people read your work" or "don't get discouraged when someone criticises your work". I know these things.

Actually that bit did get me thinking. Are we all familiar with the Table Of Praise And Criticism?

When I was seven I had a teacher who had a really high opinion of the cognitive reasoning skills of seven year olds (to be fair I was pretty bright). He taught us about the Table Of Praise And Criticism, which I think is the bedrock upon which my ability to accept criticism is based:

I'm not sure if "unhelpful" was the term, but it's less stigmatised than "useless" which is what I suspect my teacher used.

There are four forms of feedback: Constructive Praise ("I liked the way you described the tree on page five"), Constructive Criticism ("I think your storyline gets lost in chapter four"), Unhelpful Praise ("This was great!"), and Unhelpful Criticism ("You suck"). This is nicely organised and appeals to me.

We spent a lot of time in class learning to identify and separate Constructive from Unhelpful, which gets more and more complicated the older you get. The nice thing about the table is that it minimizes the value judgment placed on the artist, because it's focused on evaluating the feedback and the person providing the feedback.

Unhelpful Praise is not necessarily a bad thing. Everyone likes to be told they're awesome. If it doesn't contribute to the development of the artist, it doesn't actively hurt them, either. On the other hand, there was no greater sin as a seven year old than committing Unhelpful Criticism. Because unhelpful criticism reflects badly on you as a person, that all you can think of to do is be mean.

The point is, really, that while you do put yourself into your work, criticism of the work is not criticism of the person, and the only valuable criticism is specific, direct, and aimed at improving the work rather than denigrating it (because that's Unhelpful Criticism).

Um, so it's easy to say "Don't listen to the haters", but it's much more helpful to give people a way to separate useful from hateful, and a framework within which to defend themselves.

Well, that came out not at all like a book review.