Some of the people I know hate to go to the theater with me because, in their words, “you don’t like anything.” I find the claim ridiculous. I mean, I love a lot of movies…right? I guess my issue is that I don’t hold my punches back. I loved the new Star Wars movie. Sure, but I had a lot of issues with some of the characters and some of the plot. I won’t go into that film’s issues, but I do this for a lot of movies, whether I like them or not. And it’s all because, and I really do believe this, writers are horrible as critics. They just know way too much about storytelling for their own sake.

One way that I’ve always seen this as bad, especially if you’re sharing your work with a fellow writer, is that writers tend to over-analyze. Within writing, there’s just too much minutia. I’ve spent hours, and I mean Hours with a capital H, talking with another writer—about my work—regarding a single scene. We’d break down characters, tension, energy, momentum, stakes, and so much more jargon. And, it was all just for a three-page scene. It sounds great, but this can be extremely distracting for someone working on an entire novel. The exorbitant amount of feedback can cause anxiety in the future of the work, casting doubts or even breaking the writer’s will to go on. This has happened to me way too many times. I’ll get feedback, so much of it that I end up frozen, unable to go into the writing and fix it.

But, there’s another side to the story. Sometimes, it’s really helpful to break down a scene into all of its core components. It’s almost like taking a watch apart in order to see all of the moving cogs. It’s the only real way to see how the story is actually functioning. And, the only people who can do this are writers. Unlike a regular reader, writers tend to know the craft of writing down to the jargon level I brought up above. A regular reader would probably be unable to explain why a scene they read was boring. They’d just say they were bored or that it was slow. A writer might bring up that the stakes are too low, or that the character has no real motivation, things that you can change in a new draft. So, it’s not always too bad to have a writer look at your work.

I’m not trying to scare anyone from sharing work with a writer (or going to the theater with one). I still like movies. Nowadays, I tend to just have super subjective comments about movies and leave at “I enjoyed it” or “I hated it.” I try not to break down things too much. But, the important part is, regular readers won’t really know as much as a writer will, and that’s worth keeping in consideration with working with a fellow writer.