Critiquers, god bless 'em, are always so darn objective.
I have to disagree with you there. Critiquers have their prejudices, their tastes, their own ideas about what constitutes good writing. Most of the time they are more objective about our writing than we are, but sometimes not even that. Like all readers, they are likely to ignore or rationalize the faults in something that has enough of the things that they personally enjoy; and very quick to find fault with things that have a great deal of what they don't personally enjoy. Experienced critiquers are far better at overcoming these tendencies than other readers, but that doesn't mean that they don't cling the more tenaciously to the prejudices that remain. Fortunately, when you have several of people critiquing your work at once, such prejudices tend to cancel each other out.
In my opinion, it is
always a mistake for beginning writers, or even semi-experienced writers, to give a brand-new project to other people to critique. It has nothing to do with crushing fragile confidence (anyone who lets their confidence be crushed by criticism of something they've barely worked on needs to get realistic about their abilities). But here is the thing, sometimes "this doesn't work" means "you haven't convinced me yet" or even "I am resistant to this, and you'll have to try a lot harder to sell me on this." Of course, sometimes it really does mean that it doesn't work. How can you know the difference? You can't know -- and it's possible they don't know -- if you've given them something that's so new you haven't had a chance to develop your ideas, if the whole thing is so tentative and formless that even you don't know where it is going.
But if you wait until you have something that has enough clarity and integrity in its overall conception (the minor stuff can still be as rough as rough), then you won't have a bunch of critiquers floundering around trying to figure out what the heck it actually is that you are trying to do, so they can make helpful comments accordingly -- and some sort of consensus should emerge about which parts "could be good, but we aren't convinced yet" and the parts that are so weak you probably should rethink them entirely.
Just my opinion, but I've seen too many new writers throw out idea after idea, and start the whole thing over again and again, because they always give up before they work any of those ideas through to the next step -- and never find out what the next step looks like or how to get there.
Writers are really a kind of exhibistionists. It's the last frontier of privacy: the inner workings of our minds. We're laying bare our souls on the page. We're saying, "Here is the rest of me. This is the stuff I don't say outloud.
I have to disagree again. Sometimes when someone begins a sentence with "writers are" I hear myself saying to myself, "not me." I was once on a panel with a famous writer, male, who said, "All writers are arrogant rapists." You should have seen how every other writer on that panel, female, raised her eyebrows as one.
So, yes, I think there probably are a lot of writers who are exhibitionists, but not all of us. Some of us are saying, "Here I am revealing all this about myself because I can't help writing this story that I want to share with you, but some of the most revealing parts are things I don't want to know about myself just yet --- which is why they are coming out
quite unconsciously -- so please don't figure them out before I do. I mean, wouldn't it be nice if you just felt them and responded to them unconsciously, the same way that I'm doing now?"
