Edmund:

> How profound.   But I do agree, but in order for you to
> know what a good novel is, you have to know what a
> bad one is, no?  In that case, you'd
> have to write a bad novel and then improve?

I guess my point, Edmund, was that once one has written novels (good,
bad, and ugly), one should be more sensitive to other writers than
becoming a critic would permit.

I'm not saying that writers should help one another, offer feedback
(positive and negative), and so on, but that true criticism should be
left to those who've never written anything longer than their last bit
of nasty business.

Writing books -- even the bad ones -- is a hell of a lot of work, and
if anyone is going to criticize a book in print, let it be the
armchair critic, rather than the writer of books.

--
Quinn Tyler Jackson
http://members.shaw.ca/qjackson/
http://members.shaw.ca/jacksonsolutions/

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