I’m going to rant about writing and writing groups for a minute if that’s okay. I’m not sure if the problems you’ve described here are just a reddit thing. I have been a writer for at least twenty years. In-person writing groups weren’t really too different from what you’ve described here, even back in the glorious days when reddit didn’t exist. All of what I’m writing here is IMO so feel free to argue with me, but writers have to be some of the most insecure artists I’m aware of because we do actually get so little feedback on our work (unless we are immensely successful). I think this tends to make us hyper-critical and hyper-competitive. With rare exceptions I find writers to be unpleasant, privileged, liberal, etcetera. They / we are a lot like theater kids, but we get even less attention than they do. Theater kids get applause and laughter and gasps, sometimes from large audiences, but what do writers get? A few notes here and there?

I also feel like musicians generally get a lot more immediate feedback and tend to be much more relaxed than other kinds of artists but that’s me. I’m not a good guitar player at all, but I’ve gotten people to dance when I play. I’m not a good actor at all, but people have come up to me and said they enjoyed my performances. I’ve always taken my writing the most seriously out of all my artistic pursuits, and a few decent amazon reviews is nothing compared to having a live audience react to your work. That way, you can quickly figure out what’s working and what isn’t. When you publish some writing or give someone your writing, on the other hand, sometimes months or years of work has gone into it before anyone has even seen it, so there’s a lot more at stake I guess.

There’s a book out there called The Pursuit of Perfection that I haven’t read, but which I am now going to read (because it’s been uploaded to libgen since the last time I checked…) which is all about how writing groups basically suck. (Although if you want to do one, be my guest, I might even join if you’ll let me despite all my negativity.) I can also think of something Werner Herzog said once, which is about how if he had to teach a film class, he would basically just order his students to get a journal and walk back and forth across the country for a year, journaling the whole way. According to Herzog, by the time his students finished this task, they would have learned way more about filmmaking (and life in general) than he ever could have taught them.

Writers ultimately read very differently from the way readers read. A writer, when handed another writer’s work, looks for problems. A reader, when purchasing a book, is the complete opposite—they look for entertainment. After all, if you buy a book, and it turns out that the book sucks, you feel like a chump. There is, however, a different kind of dynamic going on now with amazon reviewers trashing books for political reasons. (SF readers will give you a negative review if you have the word “fuck” in your otherwise violent and bloody SF novel about how it’s cool when space marines do a space genocide!) This has basically blackpilled me into believing that there is no such thing as objectively good art. People like Harry Potter for instance because they are liberals and Harry Potter is an effective (and admittedly well written) affirmation of liberalism. Since becoming a Marxist I’ve ended up questioning a huge amount of post-1917 western art that’s supposedly “good” but which tends to be mediocre at best, and which is only really pushed by the corporate media because it is anti-communist. (Nabokov is the most obvious example—an incredible, poetic stylist, the last gasp of 19th century symbolism, but every other aspect of his work is actually appalling. Borges is basically the Spanish version of Nabokov.) But am I just saying this as an excuse for my own lack of talent?

Ultimately I think that once you get the basics down, the best feedback comes from people who have actually paid for your work (or who have downloaded it from libgen heheh). But this also depends on your goals. If you want to pay the bills with your writing, it seems virtually impossible to do this as a communist, because the people out there who are still actually paying for books are not only not communists, but they are vehemently anti-communists , and they can sniff out your communism even if you are very careful to avoid mentioning trigger words like “capitalism” or “communism”—the dialectical materialist approach immediately sets off alarm bells for liberals. Communists tend to have neither the time nor the money to buy books. I can only write (let alone publish) at all because of an immense amount of privilege. I’ve set a goal—for many years now—of bringing home a few thousand dollars each month from my writing, but it will be a miracle, and by far one of my life’s greatest achievements, if I ever manage to pull it off (without selling my soul).

Anyway, sorry if this was too much of a downer, and good luck!