When did the bomb go off?
A few months ago, we asked a group of people to read and evaluate excerpts from a novel by an anonymous author / author for the plot, as part of the creative process.
We deliberately hid the name of the real creator under a pseudonym to get honest, independent feedback, and we did receive some valuable feedback. Of course, we also expected very critical voices, but we were completely unprepared for what happened.
Buckets were poured onto the anonymous author. The group, no matter what they were asked to do, found every little reason to stick the author as painful as possible.
Even the lack of punctuation was a reason to send the author back to elementary school, because he apparently slept for several years in the primary classes (importantly – we informed from the beginning that this is a completely raw text, before editing and proofreading, and we only ask the readers to rate the STORY) .
Here is one of the mildest of pricks, there have been many more. One thing that united these critical statements: they did not contribute anything to the work on the text, they did not help, did not indicate any areas for improvement. They only served to “knock down”. Because you can.
If they hit a real debutant, he would probably end his adventure with writing after this experience – and this is the opinion of the real author of the criticized texts, a person with several very popular books on his account.
Why # AutorTeżCzłowiek?
After several months of hard work, we managed to control the group and show its members other ways to express their thoughts, and this experience resulted in the idea for the # AutorTeżCzłowiek action.
The heart of our action is already in the name: we want to make people aware that “on the other side of the pen” there is also a human being. Not a robot or artificial intelligence. A man, a creator, who exposes himself to a large extent by making his work public, and ruthless criticism is in such a case even more severe.
We are not saying that you shouldn’t criticize, we don’t want to shut
people up. We just want to make them aware that there is a colossal
difference between constructive, helpful criticism and a ruthless, aggressive attack that does nothing and
helps in no way .
What are we planning?
# Discussions between authors (of course, live).
The inauguration of the action will be a conversation between Magda Kozak,
Andrzej Pilipiuk and Andrzej Ziemiański.
# Authors interviews.
# A constructive critique guide that teaches you to discuss texts and other works to keep it cultural and useful.
I emphasize : we do not want to shut people up, but only indicate how to formulate statements so that they do not exceed the limits of aggression and do not become an attack.
# Whatever else is “born” during the talks that are already underway.
We are open to ideas from the outside and we will be happy to implement
ideas of people who will cooperate with us on the project.
IMPORTANT:
We do not close ourselves to activities as part of the Word Factory. I sincerely hope that the campaign will arouse the interest of authors from other publishing houses and media representatives, regardless of whether they cooperate with Fabryka Słów on a daily basis or not. We want to go out with an action that will be “beyond divisions”, because we believe that the topic is important
and affects every creator, no matter what he creates.
What do we need?
Help in publicizing the action – we believe that the topic is important and universal, we do not want to make an advertisement of Fabryka Słów out of it, but actually try to do something good, therefore we are open to all ideas and to all people from other publishing houses and industries.