Whiplash was a good movie but I flinched more than once. As an educator, I could have pushed (the fictional character of) Fletcher off a building. I feel the same about his methodology as I do about the public critique process. That the methodology worked for the few who could learn through any method doesn’t make up for the damage done to the many.
My Edmonton group was as harsh as my Calgarian one but was a by-invitation group. We sat around living rooms which made getting slid down a cheesegrater into a pit of vinegary hot sauce slightly more tolerable than if ebola-laced bees had also been released.
The more professionally-geared nature of my Calgary group had no problem releasing the bees on top of its cheesegrater/lava pit. The sensation of getting critiqued never became more pleasant. All stories were held to professional standards across every aspect regardless of the level of the writer. And, knowing what I know now, probably eight out of ten comments were accurate. But if I didn’t know how to fix the problem the critiquer pointed out, I assured myself I had meant to do it that way. If one comment in ten touched on something I knew how to fix, I climbed up the cheesegrater willingly.
So I am the last person to say the conventional method was effective. I barely grasped what was being taught in the dying years of craft suggestions still being welcomed at the table, even if no one truly believed their work needed most structural improvements.
Not every drummer Schillinger screams at will pull the performance of a lifetime out of the ass of sheer determination not to let the fucker win. But Fletcher thought he had a right to ruin the drummers who couldn’t handle his ordeals by cheesegrater/bees because he hadn’t figured out a workable pedagogy that doesn’t require sheer terror as a teaching bat.
Greatness comes from the potential inside the learner. People use the most divergent way of thinking when the outcome isn’t dependent on a financial reward. If there is, people will get the task done the first way they can think of but it would be a straight line from hypothesis to results.
I think that mentality creates a one-to-one parallel to writers who sit down to the critique only interested in making this draft of this work as marketable as possible before it gets sent off to one.
Most authors I’ve critiqued for free are seldom interested in exploring the potential of the plot and character in a manner that changes the first draft in any significant way. Writers who pay me serious money to critique their work are all ears, but it’s a rare bird who will take the same knowledge for free.
It was almost physically painful when one of the few comments I knew how I could sort out touched on something I knew would take hours to fix. I was already bored with the story to get it in any condition to be critiqued in a public setting.
I wanted to move on to the next thing. The cheesegrater/bee method was worth it to me, even with its 10% yield. I rarely went back and made any serious edits but I used as much as I understood in the work I was already writing. At least, that was how it felt like at first. It didn’t take long until any work meant for a professional market felt like pulling the words out of someone else’s teeth.
I think it’s human nature to avoid the cheesegrater/bee sensation. Single-cell organisms don’t have a nervous system to “feel” pain with but they still have stress reactions to negative stimuli. The idea that most writers would subject themselves to that sensation, year after year because they see value in a small percentage of the suggestions is preposterous.
Only a tiny portion of the population can learn from a screaming JK Simmons. It’s more a testimony to their will to succeed than a replicable teaching method.
As I’ve said before to experts who should have listened, no method should be taught if it can’t pass an ethics board given the damage done to its average learner. It is bad to allow educators to destroy students so that a “few” might excel under the circumstances. It is also wrong for an institution to assure their learner that there’s no value in learning craft.
The thing with whiplash is the body pays for the original blow and its equal and opposite reaction. The only cure is not to whip pedagogical theory from one extreme to another.