The Feedback Dilemna

Recently I've signed up on a writer's forum. One of the sections is critique groups, which range the gamut on genre and feedback requested. I found one that was open to new members and dealt with my genre, and figured, "What the heck? Ask for a read-through and some advice on whether enough happens/tension is high enough." But I forgot the one pitfall of groups like this. Sometimes, the people doing the critiques are too wrapped up in their own words to be able to read something and distance themselves from their own style.

Take, for example, writer X. I let Ms. X know that I was looking for overall impressions on the feel of the book, and whether it all flowed. Ms. X took my first chapter, and within a day had turned around with a line by line dissection of every sentence and how she thought it could be better. Now, buried in the (literally) 59 comments on about five pages of text, there were some helpful items. I used a unique word in two sentences that were right next to each other. A section where I talked about a scar the heroine got from an attack was confusing--it didn't seem to match the injury (It was a seperate wound from what she was talking about, but I hadn't made that clear enough). The rest was Ms. X trying to make my character talk in the voice she'd created for her own protagonist. The trouble was my protagonist DIDN'T talk like Ms. X. She was a 16 year old girl from New York. Ms. X had a much more formal (and thesaurus-based) way of writing. Purple prose, to be honest--appropriate for literary fiction maybe, but not urban fantasy focused on a teenaged girl.

So my critique, rather than talking about clarity and flow like I'd asked for, consisted of her telling me my sixteen year old New Yorker would say things like "Perhaps the bars would have offered me some populated safety," (who talks like that? Especially when they're running for their lives?) and telling me to describe the smell of a person she sees for about a minute.

I know Ms. X meant well. But it wasn't at all what I was looking for. It told me nothing about my book except that it wasn't written like hers. Quite frankly, that wasn't a bad thing. I don't want a story full of unrealistic dialog and observations that are communicated in a completly imappropriate way to the character. My protagonist sees things through her eyes and talks about them based on her own impressions, not mine. It seems I had gotten that part right, perhaps. Now I just had to find a way to bow out of a full critique of my book gracefully, because 350 more pages of comments on how my character didn't talk like hers wasn't going to tell me much more than she's already said.