Crisis

In the past four hours, I've left three reviews on two stories on ff.net. None of these reviews were particularly complimentary -- in fact, all of them had several items the author needed to fix. And now, after having left these three reviews, I'm feeling a little...full of myself. Haughty. Mean. Egotistical. What gives me the right to tell someone "I don't think the way you're writing a story is the right way?" What gives me the right to say "You're making a lot of the same mistakes many beginning writers do" to a girl from Jordan who's been on the site for all of a month and probably doesn't speak English as her first language? What authority do I have that could possibly allow either of these girls to take my criticism seriously?

I liked the first story. Really, I did. It was a fairly well constructed and clearly well planned Horatio Hornblower fanfic. Finding one of those (especially after the A&E miniseries came out) was impossible -- book canon went out the window. Mary-Sues were rampant. This story had all the promise of not being a Mary-Sue, or at least of keeping the Mary-Sue as a supporting character, a stock image for the background to annoy Hornblower and keep a female presence in the room. She even acknowledged that she had read the books, which I gave her due credit for. But I spent a whole paragraph in my reivew explaining the vagaries of the Duke of Wellington's title to her and why "Wellington" is not a name we can apply to Barbara Wellesley, the Iron Duke's fictional sister and Horatio's wife. What gives me the right?

The second story was the one written by the girl from Jordan. I wanted to read it because her author's note was afraid she wouldn't get any "good reviews" because her main character was a Muslim. I wanted to show her that the religious orientation of her character shouldn't be a grounds for flaming. (And we all know how I feel about multifaith dialogue fics...) I wanted to give her a 'good review'. Sadly, that didn't happen. The story was written in a very elementary style, introducing superfluous details about the character in the first paragraph that could only come from an author trying too hard to make it look like they spent time thinking about who thier main character was. I thought the concept was great, but the execution needs a lot of help. I don't know if I can give that help. I'm not qualified to teach English yet! Heck, I can't even explain my own grammar to other English speakers! What gives me the right to tell this girl "You're making a lot of the mistakes beginning writers make, but it's okay, practice makes perfect!" I'm still learning how to write myself! I'm not perfect. I'm not even particularly good at what I do.

Obviously I haven't reviewed anything (seriously reviewed anything) in a while. And clearly I'm having a little bit of a crisis of authority now.