Arwen Spicer's Blog: Diary of a Readerly Writer (and Writerly Reader) - Posts Tagged "writing"

We all know there's such a thing as being too close to your fiction writing, losing "authorial distance" and getting lost in the mazes of your own issues. But right now, I'm in the midst of the opposite -- I feel way too far away.

I'm at a point in my novel, The Forwarder, where the plot takes a very angsty turn. This is a novel I plotted out in broad strokes around 2006, which was a lifetime ago for me psychologically. If I were inventing a story fresh today, it wouldn't be nearly this dark. But it is what it is, and it's a story I need to tell.

The trouble is I'm not in a dark place right now. That's a very nice kind of trouble to have, mind you. And, in fact, it's a powerful motivation for not wanting to dig into the deep, dark spaces to find my characters' inner agony. I've had enough of that, thank you very much. But the result is a sense of extreme distance from the drama. I'm having to call on memories of difficult times in my life without wanting to sound the depths of those memories. It feels fake. I don't know if it reads that way -- this is first draft stuff I haven't workshopped yet -- but it feels that way.

I don't know what the upshot will be. Revision, I suppose, as always. Of all the problems I could have as a person, not being miserable is probably the one I'd choose first. But it makes grief hard to write from the gut. Hopefully, I can piece it together in a way that works.

I agree with the rest of the world: Gravity is a fantastic film that I recommend to everyone. For an excellent analysis, see Lettered’s post on Dreamwidth.

For now, I’d like to talk specifically about technologies used in Gravity as an example of a type of technological reasoning I use in my science fiction in the Continuation universe.

Gravity is set in space – space! – presumably around 2013: it “should” be reflecting the pinnacle of modern technological development, right? Yet many of the technologies we see the characters use are retro, as if they came out of 1960s conceptions of space travel. We see airlocks that open with the turn of a handle (a rather 19th-century technology). We see landing modules that operate using rows of old-fashioned pushbuttons rather than touch screens. We see print instruction manuals color-coded by cover. As many have remarked on the considerable realism of Gravity, I’m going to posit that these technologies are fairly plausible for current space exploration. And well they should be: they make perfect sense.

But our society has a tendency to assume that more recent, more “advanced” technology equals better technology and to extrapolate this into science fiction. For example, the theory goes, in the future, you certainly won’t see space ships run by pushing buttons. Buttons have already been made obsolete by touch screen icons. Before long, people will just use neural implants, and so on.

The pushing buttons thing keeps coming back to me because my far-future, technologically advanced civilizations do, in fact, push buttons. And it’s not because I’m not aware that touch screens exist, or holograms, or neural implants (as future possibilities). It’s because there’s a stability to an on/off button. Or to go back to Gravity, when you’re about to smashed by space debris and have just a few minutes to launch your escape module for Earth, what you really, really don’t want is for your touch screen to have an electrical fault and black out or get greasy and not respond to your touch. What you want is a nice button that will directly activate a mechanism when you push on it.

Well, that’s 2013, one might say. In the future touch screen technology will be better. Yes, this is a good point. And in science fiction, of course, you can posit whatever you like. You can imagine that humans develop such advanced technology that it’s almost godlike and, like Iain M. Banks’ Culture, you can pretty much do whatever you want. But if you’re in a middle zone, where futuristic tech meets some sort of some imperfection, some possibility of malfunction, you want to minimize the chance for malfunction, and you do that by minimizing the complexity of the mechanism. A touch screen is more complicated than a button; all things being equal, it is, therefore, more prone to error. The basic dictum is:

A technology should be the simplest mechanism available for optimally performing the task.

Now, for some tasks, that will be a very complex mechanism: the results of micro-laser surgery cannot be replicated with needle and thread. But there’s no reason an airlock can’t be cranked open or that landing module directions can’t be in print.

My readers sometimes express confusion that I have some very high tech peoples using very simple technologies. A recent recurrent comment from a critiquer (a very helpful critiquer, let me add) goes something like, “Why are these high tech people using a knife?” Well, why do the Japanese, who are the world’s premier producers of robots, use two sticks to pick up their food? Because it works. Because – for all intents and purposes – there’s nothing to improve on.

I don’t claim that my schemes for tech use in the Continuation always make sense. I’m not a great technician, even in fiction. But the general philosophy is sound. Cutting edge is not always better. And there’s no reason why the distant, high-tech future shouldn’t keep on using knives, forks, chopsticks, cups, plates, robes with belts, shoelaces, metal hair clips, ink on a piece of paper, or push buttons. If it ain’t broke, don’t give it more pieces to break.

With the heightened visibility of fan fiction in recent years, conceptions of what constitutes professional-caliber fiction have been in flux, and derviative fiction (based on pre-existing works) has been slowly regaining legitimacy. I want to share my new enthusiasm for the richer, truer world that opens up for all participants in narrative when we accept the artistic legitimacy of retelling stories.

The Copyright Model

Our culture's dominant view of what constitutes quality narrative still draws its lines based on copyright. Under this model, professional writers write “original fiction”; i.e. works dissimilar enough from preexisting copyrighted works that the writer (or publisher) can claim copyright over them. Published writers who extrapolate stories in public domain are sometimes highly respected but sometimes placed on a lower tier than "original" writers. At a lower status, but still professionals, are authorized writers of works within others' copyrighted universes, such as official tie-in novels. Low status and traditionally derided are fan fiction writers, who write unauthorized derivative works.

The dividing line for professionalism in this model is how much the writer gets paid. Original and authorized authors make money through traditional publishing (and, more rarely, self-publishing); unauthorized fan fic writers are legally barred from profiting on copyrighted works.

From an economic perspective, this distinction is important. In order to have a flourishing artistic culture, we need a lot of people to spend a lot of energy creating works of art. This energy is severely restricted if artists must work forty hours per week at a "day job" to pay the bills. Now, many do create excellent art for free and many always will. But our pool of top-notch art will shrink if artists cannot make a living at their art. To protect social structures that allow artists to make money should be a social priority. Copyright was created for this purpose: to generate artificial scarcity so that creators can make money through supply and demand.

We all know this model is crashing in 21st century due to a) the unfeasibility of maintaining artificial scarcity of copies in the digital age and b) information glut, which increases competition and, thus, reduces sales for most works. These are huge problems, which need solutions, but they raise questions about economics more than the quality of art. To reclaim a richer, more inclusive cultural space for art and artists, we need to decouple profitability from quality.

The Myth That Original Art Is Superior

One of the most damaging consequences of the copyright model of art is the assumption that original art is better than derivative art. This perception is attributable to various factors. In a correspondence on LiveJournal, Shimere277 observed that the 20th century was in love the new and original as a sign of rebellion against earlier cultural norms. Thus, original art came to be privileged as higher art, a bias that persists into the 21st century.

On a more mundane level, original works continue to be identified with paid professionals. To be legally paid for a work, one must have copyright permission. Authors (or publishers) generally hold copyright only over their original works. So by and large, they get paid for original works while authors of unauthorized derivative works are unpaid. Since paid professionals are considered, by definition, better than unpaid amateurs, then, at least as a generalization, original works (paid) must be better than derivative works (unpaid).

The problem is that, even as a generalization, this is wantonly untrue. We have thousands of years of literary evidence that original narratives are not superior to derivative narratives. In fact, most famous narratives of more than a few hundred years old are extrapolations of older traditions. Let’s take a few examples from the good, old Western canon (because this is the canon I know): [1]

* The Epic of Gilgamesh
* The Iliad and Odyssey
* The Oedipus plays
* Prometheus Bound
* The Trojan Women
* The Aeneid
* Ovid’s Metamorphoses
* Ovid’s Heroïdes
* Dante’s Divine Comedy
* Everything about King Arthur
* Various tales of Robin Hood
* Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and much of The Canterbury Tales
* The vast majority of Shakespeare’s plays
* Milton’s Paradise Lost
* Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound
* Byron’s Don Juan
* Grimm’s Fairytales
* Andersen’s Fairytales
* Tennyson’s Ulysses
* Joyce’s Ulysses

Moreover, we have many very well paid, unambiguously professional writers today much of whose work is derivative. A few examples:

Joss Whedon (The Avengers)
Russell T. Davies (Doctor Who)
Steven Moffat (Doctor Who and Sherlock)
Neil Gaiman (much of the source material of The Sandman) [2]

So unless we’re going to argue that Homer, Vergil, Ovid, Shakespeare, and Milton just weren’t that good, we have to face the reality that there is nothing inherently inferior about writing a story based on a pre-existing story.

But Those Stories Aren’t Fan Fiction (Or...?)

Modern "fan fiction" originated (or gained a community) around the 1970s when writers, mostly women, began sharing stories that were take-offs on other stories, often TV shows and quintessentially Star Trek. Then and now, fan fiction had tendencies that came to define the “fan fiction” stereotype:

* It was based on copyrighted works and written without permission.
* It was written by women, most of whom were not published authors.
* It focused on interpersonal relationships (vs. plot).
* It was often romantic and/or sexual.
* It did not stand alone as an independent work: for example, it didn’t describe the story's universe or generate a self-contained plot.
* Much of it wasn’t well written.

These characteristics are still widely used to belittle fan fiction as “wannabe” art. But let’s unpack them:

* Fic lacks copyright permission: I’ve argued above that this is not relevant to quality, besides which a lot of works posted as “fan fic” are based on public domain works, such as the novels of Jane Austen or Les Misérables.

* It's written by unpublished women: this is a (sexist) ad hominem attack irrelevant to a particular work’s quality.

* It focuses on relationships over plot. Aristotle would say this is a bad sign. But since the early 20th century, character-driven narrative has widely been considered legitimate and, indeed, arguably "higher" art than plot-driven narrative. The continued bias against character-driven narrative in fan fic is probably related to the preponderance of genre fiction in fandom. In general, original genre fiction has remained more plot driven than literary fiction; ironically, original genre fiction itself is often disparaged for this. In any case, there are fics with strong plots.

* It is often romantic/sexual. Yes, but so is a lot of good writing, and a great deal of fic does not focus on these areas; indeed, there is an old and established category called “gen” for non-romantic/non-sexual fic.

* It doesn’t stand alone. This is often true, but then, it doesn’t have to: its intended audience already knows the broader story. By the same token, the Iliad and the Odyssey both begin in medias res. Indeed, starting in the middle of a story the audience already knows is a defining characteristic of traditional epic.

* Much of it isn’t well written: This is true; it’s equally true of original fic, but poorly written original fic gets fewer readers and is less visible. Yet much fan fic is every bit as well written as much of traditionally published fiction and better than some.

Though what we commonly think of as “fan fiction” is, indeed, a different sort of writing from, say, the poetry of Shelley or Milton, the difference is in cultural tendency, not essential characteristics. Every factor for which fan fic is commonly derided is not true (or not relevant to the quality) of a good number of fics. We come back to this reality: there is nothing inherently inferior about derivative works, classic or on An Archive of Our Own.

So Maybe All Those Reboots Aren’t a Bad Thing

Derivative works are becoming more prominent, not only in low-budget contexts. Many lament that large percentage of blockbuster genre movies today are remakes, reboots, or extensions of existing franchises. They worry that original voices are drowned out. I have been among those critics and agree that refusal to take a risk on an unknown work can impede artistic creativity.

But overall my thinking has shifted, and right now, I'm not too worried. In fact, in this historical moment, a cultural emphasis on reclaiming and retelling old stories may be salutary. New stories will always be with us. Humans make them up naturally, recounting an anecdote of how we saved a lost kitten behind a dumpster, for example. But the vast majority of stories that endure across the centuries, the ones that form a continuity of myth, legend, and insight about human life, are repeatedly reimagined: they pass through many hands. This is true of biblical accounts, myths, fairytales, etc.

One can argue that these stories are retold because they're good. But they are also good because they're retold. As any fan fic writer knows, when you have a "canon" story to build from, you are free to focus on your strengths as a writer to create the effect you want. When hundreds or thousands of storytellers get their hands on a story, they often butcher it... but they also refine and evolve it: versions emerge that express the best strengths of those diverse minds. One version may establish a strong plot, another delve into character, a third add beauty to the language, a fourth subvert cultural assumptions. Hamlet, for example, has antecedents in multiple medieval texts; the story was refined into a psychologically incisive and eloquent tragedy by Shakespeare, but the First Folio version (1623), with many textual differences from the Second Quarto (1604), appeared after his death. Retelling gives us some of our most powerful, beautiful stories.

It also gives us cultural continuity. Generations in Western Civilization, for example, have shared common stories to make meaning out of life: Paul seeing the light on the road to Damascus, Odysseus returning to his family, King Arthur sending his knights in search of the Grail. These stories allow us to understand each other across the generations, to access the wisdom of earlier people and cultures so that we don't constantly have to reinvent the wheel in discovering how to live.

In the 21st century, however, technological revolutions in the dissemination of information are inundating us with new texts. This is not all bad by any means. These technologies democratize art, empower marginalized voices, allow access to a phenomenal array of stories from around the world, bolster multicultural literacy, and are creating a new commons for collaborative and derivative art. As an original writer, fic writer, and fan, I've benefitted from all this; I wouldn't lose it for the world. But one side effect is a drowning out of common stories that form cultural literacies and a historical continuities with our foremothers and forefathers. I can understand (in translation) Aristotle's commentary on the Iliad from 2300 years ago, but I have no idea what my own friends are talking about when they discuss playing Mass Effect. Now, it's no problem for different people to enjoy different stories, but when we reach a critical fragmentation in which we don't share enough to form a cultural databank of common metaphors and learning, we've lost one of the most important stabilizing factors in human society.

I don't think we've reached that point. I don't know if we ever will. I do know we don't want to; we don't want a civilization in which we cannot meaningfully reach each other across time through common stories. And, therefore, we must retell stories, because a single iteration of a story will get worn out and die. Conversely, if a story is alive, we retell it. By definition. That's what happens when a story excites the human mind. Whether it is an ancient tale, like the life of Buddha, or a body of work spanning a couple of generations, like The X-Men, building and sharing stories over time strengthens the stories and, therefore, us.

Hollywood's current tendency to revisit existing franchises is a sign of financial caution (or cowardice, if you will). But the reason such stories are a relatively safe bet is that people are attracted to stories they already know. I see this in myself when I reflect on movies I've seen in the theater in the past year or so:

Les Misérables
Star Trek: Into Darkness
Ender's Game
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
Oblivion
Gravity
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

This covers a majority of my recent moviegoing, and only two of these films, Oblivion and Gravity, are not based on pre-existing stories I have watched or read. I am excited about and comforted by stories I already have a relationship with. They have a deeper meaning because they are part of my history, my knowledge base. Moreover, in an age in which I have my choice of thousands of new stories, most of which, by Sturgeon's Law, are not very good, these known stories are safer. I can guess they will be at least a moderately good use of my limited time.

A cultural return to retelling known stories (whether by Hollywood or fan fic writers) may be an impulse to counteract information overload. It may be a healthy rebalancing of our cultural scales to place more weight on fewer, better known stories that we can share. This emphasis makes it harder for original writers to break in; as an original novelist, I assure you I feel this. The good news is that it also signals a return to a freer, more participatory reader-writer relationship. Regardless of the impositions of copyright law, when we share a narrative culturally, we own it collectively. The more widely it is known and the more times it is retold (in authorized or unauthorized forms), the more it becomes folklore that we can all take a hand in shaping.

Disclaimer: I was a beta reader for the fic, "The Body," linked above as an example of excellent fic.

Notes:

[1] My examples in this essay are almost exclusively from Western canon. I'm using this canon because it is my native culture and the focus of my academic study and, thus, I have some authority to speak to it. As far as I can tell, my statements generally apply across world cultures, and, of course, diverse cultures have enormously rich narrative traditions, but I am not qualified to speak to them in any depth.

[2] If you're noticing that every single writer I’ve mentioned is a man--and mostly, probably white, yes. Yes, they are. And, yes, that is highly relevant to what’s considered legitimate and professional, but it’s also another essay.

I am breaking a rule. Everybody knows that it is a terrible idea for a writer to write fiction based on the venting personal pain. There's no authorial distance; the lack of perspective is obvious; the characters and situations will be out of balance. It will sound like angry, juvenile, Mary-Sue-ish ranting. Heck, I learned a long time ago not even to write academic papers about books I especially love because they lack critical distance.

Yet here I am, writing furiously on a book (titled Mercy) that is largely spurred by venting my personal grief about my friend ditching me this past fall.

Here's my justification. Two justifications: 1) it's therapy. That's fair. And I think, as such, it's helping, but this isn't an artistic justification. Therapy may be great for me, but there's no guarantee it will make good art and a good chance that it won't. Which brings us number 2, the artistic justification: there is a power in writing hot.

By this I mean, writing out of emotion: throwing onto the page whatever the heart most needs to say. Angry name-calling, apologia, self-justification, random philosophizing, fear, angst, crazy sarcasm, rabbit holes galore. I want a record of it. Partly just for myself (I seem to be full of fragments today). I want to be able to look back in a year or five and see what my grieving process was/is.

But there's a use for this in literature too. My main character is also in a grieving process. This book—a revision of an old project—has become a story about grieving. I can best express her process by feeling the process in my bones. When I want to shout imprecations about betrayal, she wants to, and the force of the feeling comes out real, much realer than if I tried retroactively to work myself into a state five or ten years later when I'm somewhere else.

So here's what I imagine will happen if I ever work this book into good science fiction literature:

Right now, the book is a weird amalgam: one part old sci-fi romantic road story I started creating at seventeen (over twenty years ago); part revision of 2011 to a create a more philosophical, reflective story of finding love unexpectedly; part grief-and-guilt-ridden rant about lost friendship and betrayal coming unapologetically almost word for word out of my own life right now. It's a weird mess.

Eventually, I suspect that 80% of the lost-friendship rant text will be revised out (though probably preserved in my archives for my own therapeutic purposes). What will be left will be the gems that concisely express the grieving process in a proper narrative form. Meanwhile, that process will become increasingly thematically integrated into the actual fictional story of these characters being mysteriously stuck on a planet, investigating how this came about. Hopefully, the end result will be a thoughtful work of sociological/literary science fiction that principally argues that human grief and interpersonal pain is a main driver in human society, whether in a particular friendship or in events as cosmic as interstellar war. And hopefully, it will come out as a readable story.

If it doesn't, it's still helpful as therapy. And it will certainly show a raw truth that a more systematic control of the written word could never capture. I may not be writing a good book right now, but I know I am writing some good prose. Writing, like grieving, is a process, and sometimes we need to start hot.

I write for the same reason people fall in love: because the soul needs to communicate with others. And as with love, writing is not a one-way street. Every writer is a reader, and every reader is a participant in writing. We create based on what we’ve learned from others, and when we read, we translate the words (or video images, music, etc.) through the contexts of our minds to produce our own version of the story. I am happy that we live in an age in which the basic fact that all art is a collaboration is becoming accepted once again and the myth of the solitary author producing an artifact called “original” work is slowly melting back into deeper sea of human storytelling.

(Read the rest at Johnnie Mazzocco's Writing Through the Body blog.)

I admit it. I'm a fan fiction writer at heart. I like having a world already created and inserting a couple of characters having a long, intense conversation. But in original science fiction, you've got to come up with the world yourself, and here's where my pay-attention-to-the-characters-first predisposition has gotten the better of me.

There I was, polishing up my nicely revised first chapter of Mercy in preparation for applying to the Oregon Literary Fellowship, and it occurred to me to put in some time filling in actual dates in place of [DATE] notes that have been sitting in the first few paragraphs for four or five years. Shouldn't be a big deal, I figured. The text states that poor 'Eblia has been unconscious for about 20 hours; I may need to tweak that, but the figure should be in the ballpark.

So I pulled out the old astrographic map, checked some Tide (a.k.a. wormhole) locations, and crunched some lightspeed velocity equivalency numbers. Turns out that in the shortest possible journey I can contrive at the fastest allowable speed in the Continuation universe, poor 'Eblia has been unconscious for 375 hours, which is 15 standard days!

This is surmountable. For one thing, it's nice to be in a science fiction context where I can conjure up a drug that will slow her metabolism to keep her alive over that stretch of time (not on life support). But this single change forces massive rewriting of the first three chapters—and updating of plot points throughout the story. It changes the order in which people have to meet each other and greatly complicates the intricacy of the conspiracy poor 'Eblia has fallen afoul of. This, by extension, means that 'Eblia is a more important player than I (or she) thought she was. (If she weren't, no one would bother with the immense planning that would have to go in to contriving this long, unconscious space hijacking across at least one border patrol.) Luckily, I can make a case that 'Eblia is that important: after all, hypertelepaths are rare and dangerous spies when properly motivated to suss out your plans. I just wish I known all this four years ago.

The moral of the story: don't wait four or five years to do your world-building homework. It'll bite you.

I have been taking advantage of unemployment from teaching this summer to do a slew of writing on my current sci-fi novel, Mercy. (Pausing for a moment of gratitude at the socioeconomic privilege that allows me to take this time to write instead of looking for a summer job.) I am presently about 3/4 through a pretty solid first draft and moving quickly, looking forward to doing a preliminary manuscript critique swap with my friend and YA author Camille Picott in a few months.

At one point, I almost changed the title of Mercy to Villains, which would be a pretty apt descriptor. The book's basic argument is that we all do cruel things to each other sometimes because, being human, we get hurt and we lash out. The most mustache-twirling villain is nothing more than someone who's been hurt enough to lash out with irrational rage and deep psychological imbalance. I've thought about this a lot, while writing Mercy and even while reading kids' superhero books to my son, where Batman fights the Joker, or what-have-you. I find myself paying less attention to the hero or the plot than the villain's psychology (even when he's cardboard and has none). In one book, I was positively surprised when Batman carted the villain off to jail and the story ended without our ever finding out why the villain was so obsessed with turning Gotham into an arctic deep freeze. "Isn't this missing the point?" thought I.

Anyway, that's the point of Mercy. Its protagonist is a basically good woman, if anything a highly moral, self-exacting woman, grappling with the recent loss of a very important friend in the fallout from cruel things she had said in a time of personal pain a few years before. She'd behaved as a villain—and got her comeuppance, as villains generally do. Still in the first flush of the shock at her friend's desertion, she is thrust into a sci-fi road story mystery, marooned with some other folks on a planet and trying to figure out why/how. The book centers on her unpacking of motive: who would want to strand them? Why? What's emotionally at stake? What pain has pushed someone(s) to play the villain in deserting them in this place? It's my hope that her personal struggles will resonate with the broader question of the role of pain and revenge in human doings (personal to international).

So why is it called Mercy? Because we can't atone. We can't heal all the wounds we gouge. We can't undo the words that scar the memory of others. We can only hope for forgiveness, hope to forgive others, hope to forgive ourselves in the light of truly coming to know ourselves better. We can hope for mercy.

Run over by the locomotive of new adoptive parenthood, I dropped out of writers critique groups last year and have just recently moved back into seeking critiques for my work. As I settle back into the routine of being told what's wrong with my writing, I've been reflecting on rules of thumb I find helpful in receiving critiques:

1) Give minimal notes/background to critiquers. Obviously, this depends on context. If a critiquer is coming into to chapter 5 of your novel without having read the rest, you need to provide a summary. Likewise, you may be looking for a certain kind of feedback (ex. line edits) and wish to point critiquers in the right direction. In general, however, there is great value to letting a critiquer experience your text cold, as a regular reader would. Seeing how they respond without outside guidance is very revealing.

2) Sit on the critique for a while. Taking criticism is a mini-grieving process. You're proud of this nice piece of writing you've done. You send it out. It comes back torn apart, full of plot holes you hadn't seen and things you didn't manage to communicate. As with any grieving process, coming to grips with this takes time. Give yourself the time. Specifically:

Do not respond to comments for at least 24-48 hours, except to say "thank you," for talking back to a critique oft loseth both the critique and friend. My immediate emotional response to criticism of my writing often takes one of these four forms:

a) You totally missed the point!
b) How could that possibly be unclear?
c) Okay, I see your point, but HOW can I fix it?
d) What? I have to explain that my characters are human beings again?

None of these responses is helpful, of course, and there is great benefit to sitting on them until they go away and a calmer mind can, if needed, ask for clarifications and further assistance.

Read the critique, set it aside, and let your unconscious do the work. As with so much in life, intractable problems solve themselves with time. In virtually every critique I receive, I come up against an initial wall, some problem I have no idea how to address: no place to insert the infodump, no way to correct the screwed timeline. In response to this despair, I've developed a practice of just reading over all comments, reflecting on them as I go, and then putting the critique and the story out of mind for a few days. It's remarkable how often those intractable problems become readily solvable if I sleep on them.

3) Assume you should make the change unless you have a clear reason why you shouldn't. Again—rule of thumb: this isn't true 100% of the time. But in general, if I find myself resisting a proposed revision, I want to be clear on why. Do I really have a justification for keeping the original, or am I just being lazy, frustrated, demoralized, etc.? Sticking to the "why keep it" test greatly increases my confidence in my text.

Critiques are indispensable. They are as much a part of serious writing as writing is. And reading them often sucks. But I find if I go in with an open mind and an understanding of my own processing needs, I reap the benefit every time.