What does it mean to critique a story?
An invitation to discuss what a critique should include and what, as a writer, you expect from a critique of your work
I entered a competition. I wasn't overly pleased with the story I submitted. Neither were the judges.
Actually, that's not fair. One was enthusiastic. The other two sort of liked it, I think? All three had comments to make about it. I was happy to receive their feedback.
It doesn't matter what competition it was and I can't release the story yet until the winners are announced. I will not be one of them though and I am okay with that. I've just written a microfiction a day for 366 days after all. I'm still resting on those laurels and will do for a little while yet, thank you.
It was a hard write. First competition outside of challenges on Vocal. Three parts to the prompt that I had to follow. I didn't like the genre. Not my forte. It was the one that I was hoping I would not be given. I rushed it. I just wanted it done. I can write microfiction, I thought and reeled something off. It was okay. I felt pressure to get it completed in the time window. I did feel the pressure of having something riding on it. We all want our work to be well received, don't we? I have been luckier than most in this regard.
So, you can sense a whinge coming on?
You'd be right.
I'm quite happy to have my writing scrutinised. I can honestly say that it was one of the worst microfictions I've written but it wasn't bad bad. It was just ordinary. It had all the components of a tale with a cliffhanger ending but it wasn't my best.
I was interested to see how the judges critiqued it. There was some constructive comment from Judge One which I will definitely take on board about linking my ideas and varying how I do this. Yep. I see that.
Judge Two's suggestions were a little stranger. My story was meant to be insular and atmospheric inside and they thought that I should have said more about what was outside. Mmm. They also said that I should have revealed more about the characters but if I had done this, I would have given away too much. Different story altogether.
Judge Three had loads of comments about reordering my sentences and switching things around, making things stronger. Frankly, and this is not schadenfreude nor its sidekick Sour Grapes, I didn't agree. I felt like they wanted me to write the story as they thought it should be written. I felt like they were applying their writing style to my story.
You can offer feedback to the judges so I did. I took their comments and my story and had them side by side, looking at what they pulled out of it and addressed it point by point.
I haven't taken any of it personally. I read it, analysed it and replied to it. My thinking was If they can give me honest feedback, then I should also be able to give them feedback which is honest and reflects my view.
So I did.
It's now the next day and I'm wondering if I was a little defensive. I can't look at the comments now so I'll have to stand by them, but having slept, I think that my responses may seem like I was a little irked. Which I probably was.
Anyway.
Giving a critique. What is it?
I've given this a lot of thought. I'm not sure that I can answer it definitively. The dictionary definition is:
critique - evaluate (a theory or practice) in a detailed and analytical way
Going back to my competition entry story, the judges did provide detail and they did analyse. Judge One offered advice which I absorbed. The critique of Judge Two though did jar me a little. I did feel like the comments were suggesting that I should have altered my story. In my comments back, I said that what they thought I should have included from their perspective would have made it a different story because it would have. In the cool light of day, I stand by that.
So, is it a critique to tell people what you think they should have included to make it a better read for you? I can't decide. It seems to me like there's a line that needs to be tread here between critiquing what is on the page and projecting what you think the story should be but it's narrow and shifts in a jerking and unsafe fashion if any pressure is put on it, like a rickety old rope bridge.
And then Judge Three. They took my story, sliced it up into pieces with their mind like an analytical jigsaw: they deconstructed it. Then, they attempted to advise on how it should have been put together in the first place which would have meant that it would no longer have been written with my writing style. Instead, it would have been how they would have written the story if it had been their idea. Perhaps it was not quite as ruthless as this sounded but there was a lot of "This should be put here" and "end this sentence here" and "reword it like this".
Sigh.
I think my debate lies with this statement and resulting query:
It's critical but is it a critique?
I'm glad I replied and I will be more conscious in the future of my writing for competitions. I admit that I was a little stressed and maybe a little glib in my getting this entry done. I reeled something off that I was reasonably pleased with. I probably viewed this competition as something to get completed rather than giving it the attention it duly needed in order to be considered.
I can live with that.
This still brings me back to my reason for writing this: I am still unsure of what a critique should be. I'm glad of the detailed feedback (and probably should have told them that) but I'm not sure that I can adapt wholly to their suggestions as I feel like they are stylistic issues: they are part of my writing style. In that case, if I alter to suit what my reader is expecting, then I'm not writing truly, am I?
Where does the line get drawn?
I'd love to know what you think about this. I will publish the story when I am able and I am going to offer it up to be critiqued. I value the opinion of writers on here and I would love to know your thoughts. Stay posted.
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Longitude of Power
Article review Longitude of Power: The Lesson from Star Wars, Dune and Foundation is an ambitious, hybrid text that tries to do three things at once: build a general theory of temporal politics through popular mythology, diagnose the institutional failure of the Jedi through a psychological lens that reframes the saga’s moral architecture, and then fold the entire argument back onto the material history of Hollywood by treating Lucas, Spielberg, and Coppola as living evidence of the very mechanism the myths describe. The article’s central wager is that time is not a neutral backdrop to power but its most corrosive agent, and that the deepest political danger is not invasion or even corruption in the ordinary sense, but permanence: the slow transformation of an originally adaptive authority into a self-preserving machine. This wager is not merely asserted; it is staged repeatedly through a braided method that moves between fictional empires, historical republics, and contemporary cultural institutions. The effect is a kind of “comparative mythology of decline” in which Star Wars, Dune, and Foundation function less as entertainment texts than as laboratories for thinking about authority’s dependence on duration. The strongest achievement of the article is that it does not treat these narratives as interchangeable allegories but as three distinct models of the same structural claim. Star Wars is presented as the cyclical model, where institutional rot and mythic legitimacy co-exist until a procedural surrender converts republic into empire. Dune becomes the prescient model, where the desire to eliminate uncertainty collapses the future into inevitability, and where the longest reign is not the triumph of wisdom but the apex of stagnation. Foundation becomes the statistical model, where collapse is not a moral drama but an actuarial conclusion: the empire is already dead, merely continuing its motions by inertia. Read together, these models allow the author to propose the Longitude of Power as a law-like principle: authority stretched across sufficient time and scale either mutates into tyranny or collapses into exhaustion, and the more it pursues total stability, the more it accelerates its own fragility. The phrase “longitude” is particularly effective because it shifts attention away from the usual spatial metaphors of power, centre and periphery, core and margins, and toward a temporal geometry: how long can a system remain itself before it becomes something else. That shift is not cosmetic. It gives the article a distinctive conceptual identity and helps it avoid the common trap of pop-culture political criticism, which often collapses into one-to-one comparisons between fictional tyrants and real leaders. Here, the argument is less about personalities and more about the slow physics of institutions. The article also benefits from a strong instinct for identifying where myth becomes diagnosis. The extended use of Yoda as a symbol of institutional longevity that turns into blindness is an example of how a character can be read not as a moral exemplar but as an institutional function. The claim that Yoda’s experience becomes “the wrong kind of knowledge” is a concise way of naming a sociological problem: expertise that is deeply conditioned by the past can become structurally unable to recognise novelty. The article’s best passages insist that the Jedi do not fail because they are secretly corrupt or because they lack ideals, but because they mistake endurance for truth and stability for moral health. The move from metaphysics to psychology, sharpened through the Rayencourt exchange in The Acolyte, is a second major strength. By placing emotional repression at the centre of Jedi decline, the text reorients the saga away from a purely theological conflict of light and dark and toward a political theory of affective governance. The Jedi are criticised not simply for being wrong about the Force but for designing an emotional regime that becomes pathological when paired with extraordinary authority. This is an important reframe because it allows the author to link institutional failure to a human mechanism, repression, accumulation, eruption, rather than to an external enemy. It also enables a more persuasive bridge to Dune and Foundation, both of which treat the management of human variability, unpredictability, desire, fear, as the true battleground of empire. The article’s diagnosis of hero worship as “anaesthesia” is likewise one of its most convincing political claims. It captures a recurring pattern in both fiction and history: oversight fails not because power is hidden but because it is revered, and legitimacy can function as a technology of exemption. In Star Wars terms, this helps explain why the Jedi could be simultaneously visible and unaccountable, why their errors could be interpreted as tragic exceptions rather than structural symptoms, and why the Senate could tolerate an extrajudicial force that it could not truly govern. The article’s argument becomes most compelling when it insists that collapse is often prepared by the attempt to avoid collapse, that a system obsessed with continuity creates the conditions for an internal takeover because it becomes incapable of perceiving adaptive threats. This line of thought is particularly strong in the analysis of Palpatine as a political virus, an internal parasite that exploits institutional procedure rather than confronting it directly. That reading fits the article’s broader thesis: enemies are less dangerous than duration, and the most successful threats are those that move through the channels of a fatigued system rather than against it. Where the text becomes more risky, though also more generative, is in its extension of the Longitude argument into bloodlines, dynastic continuity, and the claim that the deepest ideology of governance is not how to rule but how long to rule. This is rhetorically powerful, and it fits the thematic logic of Dune and Foundation, where breeding programmes and cloned emperors are explicit mechanisms for stabilising rule across centuries. It also resonates with Star Wars’ own fascination with lineage. Yet here the article flirts with two hazards. The first is explanatory overreach. Bloodlines are a potent mythic and narrative device, but in political theory they can quickly become a totalising explanation that risks flattening other mechanisms, institutions, class, bureaucracy, ideology, technology, into a single hereditary logic. The second hazard is interpretative slippage between fiction, cultural myth, and actual historical sociology. The text gestures to European bloodlines, dynastic returns, secret genealogies, and long continuity as “the ultimate secret of power,” and while this is thematically coherent within the mythic frame, it requires careful calibration if the article is to maintain its strongest intellectual posture, which is structural rather than conspiratorial. The article’s best material emphasises how power migrates into systems, markets, and infrastructures when it is not embodied in a ruler. That argument is already sufficient and persuasive, and it aligns well with the text’s later insistence on finance, debt, and “follow the money” as the true locus of rule. If the hereditary thread becomes too dominant, it can inadvertently pull the argument back toward a romantic anthropology of kingship rather than the more modern, and arguably more valuable, thesis the article also advances: that power survives by converting itself into administrative, financial, and technical arrangements that outlive individual rulers. In other words, the article is at its strongest when it insists that power is conserved and changes hosts, and that modern thrones are often balance sheets, contracts, and infrastructures. It is somewhat less secure when it treats bloodline continuity as the final key rather than one mechanism among others. Relatedly, the Highlander and Jesus passages are bold and imaginative, but they introduce a different register that sometimes strains the essay’s coherence. The Highlander example frames immortality as a “natural law” that should culminate in rule, with Duncan’s refusal interpreted as existential emptiness rather than ethical choice. This is rhetorically striking because it dramatizes the temptation of longevity as legitimacy, which the article elsewhere criticises. Yet the framing is ambiguous: at times it sounds as if the article is endorsing the idea that the longest-living entity should rule, only to later condemn that idea as a trap of permanence. The essay would benefit from making explicit that this is a mythic temptation, a seduction that empires and dynasties project, not a principle the author accepts. The Jesus passage likewise raises the issue of “who rules materially” when spiritual kingship refuses earthly sovereignty. This is an old political-theological question and can be productive here, especially if the article aims to show how vacuums of authority are quickly filled by competing regimes of coercion. But again, the text must be careful not to imply that love and restraint are intrinsically childish because they do not seize the throne. In the article’s own terms, the problem is not that compassion fails because it refuses violence; the problem is that compassion without institutional design is vulnerable to capture. That distinction matters. The piece is generally aiming at a structural critique of how vacuums are filled by systems, which is a strong insight. It becomes less stable if the rhetoric appears to celebrate “iron rule” as the only adult realism. The most intellectually fertile way to keep this passage inside the Longitude framework is to insist that moral commitments need institutional scaffolding, otherwise they are outlasted by more durable architectures of power. That would preserve the article’s realism without sliding into the romanticisation of domination. The Hollywood meta-argument is arguably the most original part of the abstract you provide, and it deserves the prominence it receives. Reading Lucas, Spielberg, and Coppola as a real-world enactment of the political mythology they helped build is a compelling inversion: the artists become characters within the very narrative structure of rebellion becoming empire. The claim that New Hollywood’s success produced “rebellion into infrastructure” is incisive. It captures how an insurgent aesthetic can become a repeatable industrial format once it is proven profitable, and how corporate systems learn from artistic breakthroughs how to standardise and monetise imagination. The Lucas-to-Disney moment is an especially effective analogue to the Senate’s applause, not because it implies Lucas is Palpatine, but because it shows how fatigue, optimisation, and the desire for stability can lead to surrender without malice. That is precisely the kind of temporal mechanism the Longitude concept is designed to capture. The Coppola argument, that chosen failure can function as resistance when success is indistinguishable from incorporation, is also persuasive, particularly when framed through the “art of failure” logic you bring in elsewhere. In an environment of total optimisation, a project that risks real loss, financial, reputational, and aesthetic, can indeed become a political gesture, because it refuses the safety conditions that keep the industrial machine stable. However, this part of the article also invites a careful objection. Failure is not automatically resistance. Markets can tolerate failure. Systems can even domesticate it, turning the mythology of the “failed genius” into another brand category. The political force of Coppola’s gesture depends on whether his failure remains outside the franchising logic, whether it resists being reprocessed as content, and whether it opens an alternative institutional pathway rather than merely staging an individual martyrdom. The article implies this by contrasting “successful surrender” with “chosen failure,” but it could sharpen the difference by naming what is structurally at stake: the refusal of optimisation, the refusal of franchise logic, and the refusal of managerial coherence. In other words, Coppola’s act is politically meaningful if it interrupts the logic of scalable repetition, not merely because it loses money. This is a small but important refinement, because it keeps the article from appearing to romanticise loss for its own sake. The article’s prose is generally energetic and charged, which suits its mythic ambition. At the same time, it sometimes risks rhetorical inflation. Phrases such as “the ultimate secret of power” and “natural laws” can be powerful in a polemical register, but an academic review reader may want clearer markers of where the argument is metaphorical, where it is sociological, and where it is speculative. The article’s strongest conceptual contributions, the temporal model of decay, the distinction between stability and adaptability, the idea of power migrating into systems, would be strengthened by a slightly firmer separation between analytic claims and mythic provocation. That said, the mythic provocation is not a weakness in itself. It is part of the article’s identity. The key is to ensure that provocation serves diagnosis rather than becoming its own explanatory engine. Within the Star Wars-Dune-Foundation triangle, the article’s most persuasive synthesis is its insistence that attempts to control the future make systems fragile, and that resilience requires what you call adaptive entropy. This is a valuable term because it captures the paradox that survival depends on the willingness to lose structure. It resonates with Leto II’s Scattering, with Seldon’s acceptance of collapse, and with Star Wars’ cyclical return of empire when republic becomes complacent. It also helps articulate the meta-lesson of Hollywood: creative institutions that refuse to fragment, hand over, or evolve their structures eventually sell, consolidate, or stagnate. The article’s concluding claim that “power always survives, changing hosts, waiting patiently” is perhaps its most haunting line because it refuses sentimental resolution. The question becomes not whether power can be abolished, but whether its forms can be made accountable, perishable, and decentralised enough to prevent total capture. This is precisely where the article could achieve its strongest philosophical clarity. If power is conserved and migratory, then the political project is not to eliminate power, but to prevent it from becoming immortal. That is the real convergence of Star Wars, Dune, and Foundation as you present them. The Republic fails because it thinks stability is peace. The God Emperor teaches that total peace is extinction. Psychohistory implies that imperial longevity produces inertia. In each case, the enemy is not simply evil. The enemy is permanence. The article is therefore best read not as a story about villains, but as a theory of time. Institutions do not collapse only because they are attacked. They collapse because they last too long without learning how to die. If the essay continues to develop, one constructive direction would be to bring the money thesis into even closer contact with the longitude thesis. You already suggest that when no person lives long enough to rule, power migrates into institutions, markets, and infrastructures, and that the deepest power is financial. This is one of the most contemporary and convincing ways to modernise the empire theme, because it moves beyond crowns and dynasties into credit, liquidity, and administrative systems. It would also allow the article to sharpen its diagnosis of Washington, not as a simplistic empire analogy, but as an infrastructure of permanence where emergency powers, security systems, and financial capture become the long-lived substitutes for sovereign kings. That would integrate your strongest speculative passages into a clearer structural account. As it stands, the article already has a distinctive voice and a coherent thesis. Its main risk is not incoherence but abundance. It contains enough ideas to become a book-length argument. The review conclusion, then, is that Longitude of Power succeeds most when it treats popular mythology as a serious theoretical instrument for thinking about time, institutional decay, and the metamorphosis of rebellion into administration. Its most compelling claim is that the final form of power is not necessarily the throne but the system that survives the throne, and that the only serious alternative to imperial permanence is not naive moral purity but institutional designs that can fragment, fail, and renew without surrendering to total optimisation. In that sense, the article’s final gesture, that chosen failure may be the last form of rebellion in an age of consolidation, is not just a romantic flourish. It is a challenge: to design cultural and political practices that can afford loss without collapsing, and that can refuse immortality without surrendering to nihilism.
By Peter Ayolov7 days ago in Critique
Goodbye, Mr. Duvall
It is turning out to be an interesting year. I was in the middle of teaching a class when a pop-up appeared on the screen announcing the death of Mr. Robert Seldon Duvall (yes, that was his full name). I was in the middle of a discussion on the obsession we have with winning when it comes to sports (the Winter Olympics was a theme), and I felt as though things were coming full circle. We had already lost Gene Hackman last year, and along with that titan, it feels though one particular golden age has closed off to be replaced by...?
By Kendall Defoe about 13 hours ago in Geeks
Comments (19)
Great article. I am torn when it comes to this sort of thing. It really is subjective, all this stuff. That doesn't mean it isn't useful, but by and large I wonder. Of course we all have our styles and our opinions and if I'm going to comment on your story, it's going to be through the lens of my writing style, training, influences etc.. I like that you were mindful enough to admit you might have been defensive, I think we all would be, but not everybody examines that sort of thing the next day the way you did. That, to me, is the real win.
Enjoyable read, less so an enjoyable experience for you. Well put: “It's critical but is it a critique?” The former, by the sound of it 🥺. My daughter had a similar experience in school… she refused to heed the draft feedback because it wouldn’t have been her story but that teacher’s substandard one. She was vindicated by getting a good mark🤣. You might too 😊
Oh, man! I loved this piece, Rachel! You so eloquently put to words a tension I've felt so strongly but didn't know how to navigate. That being said I obviously don't have a concrete answer to the question. But with the type of competition and "feedback" you describe I think there is a lot of subjectivity that gets injected into the "critiques". I do think it can be a hard shift in mindset though too when preparing pieces for other challenges when so much of the emphasis on Vocal is the storytelling and others it seems like your story can be "bleh" but if you write it in the desired style, bravo for you! Well that was just a lot of rambling, so sorry for the vent!
Oooh, this is a lot of good stuff to consider. It's definitely a tricky line to balance and everyone is different. Like you mention, it's especially tricky with so many different writing styles and narrative voices out there. For me the best critique has been from the people I feel care about the characters I'm working with. It's clear when someone is giving feedback for the highest good of the story/art/craft. There are a few writers on Vocal for example whose critique has strengthened my writing because it felt like they really cared about the message I was trying to convey and the effort I was willing to put in to conveying it. I think, ultimately, it's all about finding the right people who care about your work and who you're able to communicate with effectively. I'm sorry you had a crappy experience with this competition. :( Thank you for writing this piece and opening up this topic for discussion! These comments have been so interesting to read through to see what people's general attitudes towards critique are.
First, as Ruth said, sorry your experience was not quite what you hoped for. That must have been a bit of a gutter. I am looking forward to reading your piece when the time comes. My experience was different, and though I didn't get into the second round, I never expected to, the feedback felt balanced. The good was very good and the bad was not very bad. I would like to add that I share the not really knowing where the line is drawn because I spoke to Stephen about my feedback a bit and he made a good point about if more than one person is saying the same thing, for instance, it could be a genuine issue. Whereas if just one person, say, was saying it, it may be a preference thing. Some of what the more critical side said could be seen as being personal taste and preference. I guess, that's the point, when we enter any sort of challenge, either here or somewhere else, it will be down to the experience, knowledge base and also taste/preference of the critic/reviewer. If that makes sense? You make lots of great points here and although it's deflated you a little, I'm glad your spirit and understanding of who you are as a writer and your enthusiasm for your craft has not diminished. I love your writing...you love your writing. That's all that matters. Okay, the last bit more than the second to last bit. but put that in to make you laugh. :) Thank you for airing these thoughts out though, because it's important. Hope they give you a top story for this. Well done, chum!
I think this is a great article. The question is fair and it really sheds light on what most of us already know; writing is so personal; and subjective. We can learn all the rules and produce a good story with good technique and there will still be people who would do it differently. That's easy to accept, but its harder to swallow when its the basis for a critique because we can be left feeling that the only thing 'wrong' with what we wrote is that it doesn't appeal to the person offering the critique, which is really frustrating.
I feel sad, not least because Paul did the NYC Midnight competition, and his feedback was overall a positive experience. The points the critic made were salient and very helpful. It sounds like you didn't get the best people to give your feedback, and I am sorry about that. I am glad you gave them an honest review in return!
I feel your angst. Are you writing for you or someone else? If you were submitting an article for a magazine or similar, you would have in mind what was expected, but when it comes to fiction, you are writing in your voice, from your point of view, with your imagination, and microfiction magnifies the problems. When someone tells you to rearrange things to suit them, do you run the risk of losing your voice and isn't that editing. Writing fiction is art, and art is always open to interpretation, how the judges are feeling on a particular day, can affect their reasoning. My cynical mind tells me they are justifying rejecting your story. I employed an editor on a story I wrote and he immediately started telling me to change things and it made me angry, It took me a long while to calm down and take it in. I love writing, but when it comes to competitions or challenges or the possibility of publishing, the pressure of that brings out a bit of the Mr Hyde in me. I'm sure your story was good.
"It seems to me like there's a line that needs to be tread here between critiquing what is on the page and projecting what you think the story should be" There definitely is a line there and I can't seem to distinguish it. So I refrain myself from providing any feedback although it is solicited. Firstly, I feel that I should be perfect (which I'm not) to be able to give feedback. Secondly, I'm afraid I might apply my writing style to their story or project how I think the story should be. I wouldn't like it if someone did that to me so I would never do that to anyone. The only kinda feedback that I feel comfortable giving is typos, errors in sentence structures or any kind of mix up. I know I'm not perfect in those areas but I feel that this feedback has very low chances to offend a person. Anyway, as for your question, in my opinion, a person who is giving any sort of feedback should give it based on concrete facts and not their personal preference. As for your writing, never change your style to adhere to your readers expectations. Always remember that you're writing for you. Never change who you are for anyone because you gotta be true to yourself
I can't help but think that unless there are clear guidelines for any competition or submission, it will always come down to whether the person you get likes it. That is human nature. You write a story; how you want it or think it should be written. Some people have a gift for putting it in the proper sequence, using the correct words, etc. For others, there are skills to be learned in this area, but at the end of the day, success is either because it is liked or not liked by the judges.
Hey Rachel. Good on you for entering another challenge. I think feedback/ critique is helpful but it can be so subjective. I usually give myself at least 24 hours before I respond to anything - I have to go through all the phases between “idiot, you have no clue” to “hmm, maybe they have a point”. Just my opinion! Ha! Anyway good luck in the next competition - you’re a cracking writer.
It is definitely a hard thing to balance, as judges try to be unbiased, but they can definitely creep up in there. Each person has their preferences, and that's difficult, but I suppose it's just a matter of taking their opinion with a grain of salt and hoping for the best... Sometimes a hard bet. Either way, I'd love to see that competition entry once the winners are released!!
Writing Critique (including Vocal) are subjective to the interpretation and mood of the judge at the time of reading. Here is what I told my children because it is something I believe in: 'Like all advice listen to it, what you do with it is up to you.' Also 'Never respond in anger or as a reprisal, think about what you will say and how it may be recieved.' I am glad you wrote this because it is a good reminder.
A critique should help you improve, not rewrite your style! It’s about analyzing what’s working and offering insights, without forcing the reviewer’s own preferences onto your story. It’s a balance—offering constructive feedback while respecting the writer’s vision. So, stay true to your style while considering the helpful stuff!
This is why I would suck as a critic. Other than than the obvious like not hitting the prompt, the only advise I could give would be what I would have done, which I understand, is exactly what I shouldn't do. I'm very curious to see the piece, when you're able to publish.
I find that line between critique and re-writing a hard one to straddle. I think it means it’s best for me to stay away from judging and stick to cheerleading. Looking forward to your entry!
My first thought is have you critiqued your story? Or asked yourself what you would have changed if you had more time to finish to your satisfaction or if you had not simply wanted to get it done? Seems to me, critiquing takes the story and all of its stylistic considerations on its own terms and asks and examines what works well and what doesn’t. If the story did not engage the reader, the individual should determine why before offering correctives. In my mind, a critique should address generalities by examining specific instances. I had a story critiqued by a very competent editor, who simply asked why questions. Why does this character love that character so fiercely? Where is the context that causes the reader to believe that love is genuine?
Well-wrought! And thank you for this: "schadenfreude nor its sidekick Sour Grapes" You brought me true joy with that one, deep down! As to what constitutes a fair or even a good critique, I'll give you two examples from my own literary travails: The good one: Eliminate those "hads". I was using the word in all kinds of places it did not need to be, and simply cutting those out tightened up my stories a lot! Great advice! Bad one: "I would like to see..." Reflects the personal preferences of the editor and has nothing to do with the writer's narrative voice or the technique of writing. I suppose this is okay if the submission called for a specific we didn't deliver, but most of the time, when this was the feedback I got, what they would like to see was some conspicuously political or ideological trope that had nothing to do with my story or the story they asked for. There's also that irritating tendency of some to ask for more details about the setting or reactions from characters outside of a story that would be impossible to include in their desired word count. Yes, if I was writing a novel, I certainly would include that, but you wanted five thousand words and no more...
I believe that a clear line doesn't exist... it's true that we shouldn't distort our writing style, but sometimes what others perceive is different from what we mean. And this is a question we have to ask ourselves, it happens to me here too, sometimes in the comments I read things that I hadn't thought of then I reread my story and I realize that I wasn't precise or I left room for misunderstandings. Surely the judges also have their own style and project their knowledge and ideas onto the work of others, it is very difficult. But now I'm very curious to read your microfiction !