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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm 12:14 pp and I didn't read "The Kindest" earlier because I assumed it would be brilliant - à la Yiyun Li, a master of the short story. Not even close. Did Larson get an MFA?

Larson didn't want to settle over this piece of crap writing; that is SO clearly a poorly-written rant. I'm cheering you on Dawn - never give it up![/quote]

This. I can't believe she went to bat for this particular piece of writing. I especially find it embarrassing the way her writing group fawns over it and talks about how brilliant it is.

Listen, I've been in a ton of writing groups and workshops and there's always a lot of fawning. It's kind of the name of the game -- people are putting themselves out there, it's a vulnerable position, and there is a great deal of pressure to say nice things about everyone's work. However, in the best writing groups, those "nice things" are highly specific. And, since the point of the group is to actually get better, there is generally also specific criticism to help the writer improve the work. Like if I were reading this story in a writing group, I'd have nice things to say about it -- there are places where the prose is well done, there are character details I like, and I think the plot itself (and its' underlying themes) are interesting and worth exploring.

But I'd have serious issues with the Rose character, who just feels like a joke to me. That would be okay if the story were less about her, if the focus was more on the protagonist and her husband, if the focus were on how this somewhat caustic woman finds a way to be herself after receiving this gift, how she responds to the cultural pressure to become a permanent gratitude machine. I'd love to read a story like that -- just focused on the organ recipient and allowing her to be a deeply flawed, sometimes selfish, sometimes not-particularly-grateful human being. Sounds great.

But the stuff with Rose undermines that because Rose is such a weak foil (and I question the choice to make her a foil at all, it feels predictable and dull). Rose seems to have NO redeeming qualities beyond donating her kidney. And even this is weakly explored because if there were really a person who was terrible in every respect except for this little detail where she donated her kidney to a stranger, I feel like there would be more meat on that character. Rose has no meat. She is a collection of annoying mannerisms and semi-offensive offhand statements. She's vapid and needy, but there's no real exploration of why (and in my experience vapid, needy people always have a why).

So it's embarrassing and cringeworthy to me that the other CMs had so little to say that was specific in those emails and group texts. Maybe they had other feedback that was more in keeping with what I would expect. But so much of what they right here is just "it's amazing!!!!" and... it's not. It's okay. It's a work in progress and it needs work. Even when people offer the criticism that maybe she shouldn't base it so closely on Dawn, the tone is "but of course aside from that detail it's an amazing story!!!" And as someone who has read a lot of other people's short fiction at various stages of readiness for publication, I'm floored. I've read stories that stopped me in my tracks and made me say "This is perfect, change nothing, her his a list of journals I think would make a good home for it." This story is not that, even in it's various published iterations.[/quote]

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