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My story was set at the turn of the 20th c, and the aging character out of the 19th c called someone a "flapnoodle." My reader said, "That's not a word, people don't just make up words."

One time the anonymous approval board for a text game insisted that the text description "long socks worn past the knee" should be "passed the knee", and no amount of dictionary or context would change their mind. In the end I just rewrote them as "thigh-length socks".

Saul Bellow came to our university and when a young woman asked for writing advice, he said, "Marry well." Sadly, marrying badly can ruin you, but then Nora Ephron said it's all material.

One of my characters takes a while to believe in a curse, except she's Italian, which means she'd clearly believe it right away, so I misrepresented a group. This was SLJ.

I got feedback that it wasn't believable that a British man in the late 1800s would have fought in a war in Afghanistan. The character's backstory has him as a veteran of the Second Anglo-Afghan War, a real war that Britain actually fought from 1878 to 1880.

I’ve had a lot of mean comments but my favorite of all time was my sassy puppet. A dude said it was ‘disturbing’ and ‘looked like something a crazy person would make!’ I’m like yes and 😂?

Reminds me of the story about the people who were hired to make alien music for avatar but James Cameron axed it after their work was done because it sounded alien

"English must not be your first language"

I’m now imagining aliens that come to earth on their gap year or whatever, and get “human” names the way some Chinese people pick western names. Imagining all the aliens being like “I’m gonna have them call me ‘Pete’ lol”

I often think of the letter Herman Melville received from a publisher about Moby Dick, which said, "First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale?" The rest of the letter only gets better from there. medium.com/@T.C.William...

The Rejection Letter Of Moby Dick“First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale?”medium.com

Meritocracy is real i.e. only the most talented qualified people get hired for the job. Couldn't be a greater crock of shit in the universe.

Mine is sort of reverse. In a short fiction class someone wrote about softball and used the phrase "pitch hitter". I casually said it's "pinch hitter". I honestly thought it was a typo. She got really defensive and insisted it was pitch. I told I was sure, but it was her story. 1/

At a small art exhib ten years ago, a lady entirely dressed in red pointed at a (mostly blue) surreal painting I had made and told me it was bad and I was a bad artist cause it was blue and red was better

I had the audacity to write one of my main characters in a story as Asian, which came up like two or three times, but didn't affect the plot in any way, and my grad school fiction workshop was like WHY IS HE ASIAN. Well, what should he be then? HMMMM?

"That Christmas Past [a riff on the well-known character from Dickens' A Christmas Carol] is kind of preachy".

Hmm, let's go well over a decade into the past, to be safe :D "AD 1 likes sketch A AD 2 likes sketch B" That was it. No specifics at all and no direction on how to proceed. Bonkers!

Had a client ask if I could swap out a stock photo with one where the people were less “exotic.” I asked him to be more specific. “You know what I mean.” “I need you to say it.” The photo stayed.

bsky.app/profile/sill...

Not me, but there's a classic story of when I Love Lucy was being pitched. They told Lucille Ball, "No one's going to believe that you're married to a Cuban bandleader." She responded, "I AM married to a Cuban bandleader."

I'd submitted a video essay about Jacob's Ladder's influence on early Silent Hill games. Someone said that I wasn't funny. True, the site I was on largely had funny video producers, but I wasn't trying to be funny.

You were in the presence of a science genius

I was given a brief and told to follow the existing style we already had for a social media post. On the same day it was to be scheduled,I was told to change everything so it could be "more original". :')

Write a short story where the central conflict was that the 2 characters were too upset to directly talk to each other about the fact their road trip was headed towards a third friend’s funeral. They talked around it uncomfortably until the climax where their feelings poured out.

Too many to list! One recent banger though was "I can't tell where this is set, you need to be more specific" on a story that /literally mentions every port on a shipping route by name/ 😅 (there was more truly awful feedback on that one too, but that's the funniest).

FIRST PROGRESS REVIEW OF A MULTI YEAR PROJECT! *shows work in progress* -"hmm we cant use this, it looks unfinished..." 😒

Reminds me of the time someone told me my writing had too many "complicated words". All but one of the words he'd pointed out were names I had invented for my *fantasy* story.

at 16, I showed my mom an ad I drew for the high school paper, and she said, "Why can't you be like Cathy Guisewite? Why can't you draw Cathy?" at that time, that woman was 36 with over a decade of corporate work to draw from, and she developed her skills for 6 years before sending out her work.

One editor couldn’t believe that a character would be in quite so much trouble for such a “minor trespass” (the trespass was treason)

"You've studied anatomy too much to actually draw what you see" This was a uni professor btw and when I confronted him about how the hell am I supposed to improve then was basically a shrug

University workshop... the font choice made him think it was a detective story but it very much was not a detective story and it confused him. My friends either side of me tried not to laugh since they knew I didn't have a computer and wrote it on a typewriter then photocopied it to hand it out.

Once had an editor at my old publisher remove all contractions. ALL of them. Needless to say I had… issues with that. I have never used “reject all” before (or since) but it would’ve taken too much time to weed through them. I just self-edited and we dealt with it on 2nd round with a new editor.

I wrote something where the lead was a comedian who was losing her edge. The feedback- I don't think she's funny and you should take this joke out because I didn't find it funny. Tried to clarify and asked questions but never got a response.

Showed a friend my yearly Christmas/New Year's pin-up and their response was something like "looks cool, I bet you used AI". Our friendship survived my outrage, but they did have to hear a very long, very angry rant about AI for image generation (I refuse to call it "art").

Maybe tmi but I’d painted a large vulva/vagina in textures. A dude at the exhibition was really angry with me for showing it. How dare I make people see this. He had No idea how many cock n balls we wimmin are exposed to in how many forms!!

"This plot is not original. I think I saw something like it in STar Trek fanfic." It's plot of the Yellow Rose of Cairo, if the film was a noir, you fool!

"The ambassador is a sentient shade of green. His name is Chad."

I wrote ads about wireless telemetry for a major phone company. The client asked us to switch to a daytime view of outer space because it was too dark.

It was not mine, but a friend of mine who wrote a story in which a character was described as a bard was told by her college class crit group that she needed to describe what a bard was for non-fantasy readers.

Not sure what’s wrong with me that I don’t remember any, but, it was bad, so I didn’t write it down, so I forgot it. There was one time when a readers asked why all my American characters talk like Eastern European circus performers, but I was just like, yeah fair

Mine is the time I was telling my grandmother about my cheerful newly-turned modern goth vampire character and she said, 'why don't you ever write *nice* things?' Re: the alien names - did they expect them to be named Fred and Sue?

I remember a rejection that told me to consider if my main character was truly "story-worthy" and suggested I read Save the Cat Writes a Novel.

Too many to list, but what immediately springs to mind: 1. Editor telling me I couldn't write a book about animals because "animal books are dead" (I wrote it & it was a top 10 bestseller). 2. Someone reviewing my short stories as a memoir. (She didn't like it when I became a female tree surgeon.)

Wow imagine giving aliens names that aren't human, how disgraceful (not mocking you ofc op, i just think that's pretty stupid for them to complain about, as i also give my aliens non human names)

While I was noodling on a basic idea for a plot where religion got it wrong and heaven is down not up and there's a trinity but they're not as described, someone said that I would be plagiarising His Dark Materials because the religious nutjobs also have it backwards in that.

Me, writing a slice-of-life story: Feedback guy: You're spending too much time harping on about the details of day-to-day life and not moving at a fast-enough pace in your story which I acknowledge is slice-of-life.

This unrecognizable creature from another planet is called, in it's language, Josh

My book was rejected with the comment that I was “too good at writing gore.”

The beta reader who suggested I rewrite a scene from the protagonist's POV, instead of having it recapped by a non viewpoint character. Except, I'd previously established that if the protagonist entered that location, they'd immediately become possessed by an evil ancestor. (Again.)

I had to animate a bouncing ball in college and was graded down because, "His retinas shouldn't be able to detach like that. It's not realistic." The instructor actually frame-by-framed the video for the class so everyone could get a good look at the "mistake."

EyeballYouTube video by Jake Spenceryoutu.be

Publisher request: "Please increase the breast size of all females in the game by 25%. On a racing game. My suspicion is it was a tactic to force us to change something else (You turned us down on that, so you have to do this), but sometimes videogames dev is just like that.

“I‘m sure it’s very good, but shouldn’t you be trying to change people’s lives for the better?”

I received feedback from a potential agent that my book series was 'unmarketable' in the US, because it showed police in a positive way, which the left wing hates, but the main character is a Jewish lesbian, which the right wing hates. Thankfully, they were very wrong, but who tells an author that?

I was once told that "open magic systems don't work in TTRPGs"

Trump is an alien comedian With a hit show on Galactic tv Called " Funny Human Comedy Hour "

Back when the dreadful* MZB was editing "Sword and Sorceress" I submitted a story. It was rejected by her with the pointed suggestion that I should FO and die (not exaggerating) because she believed that I had confused the words "lie" and "lay." --- *I honestly didn't know how bad at the time.

Was working on the pretty (IE: not command line) web interface for an internal-only app for work. Asked someone to look it over to make sure I wasn't missing something obvious. Was told I needed to leave room on each side of the page for ads. For a company internal web app. Leave room for ads. Yeah.

I once got a review that simply said “What a weird book” and I thought the description of the book- A steampunk Pride and Prejudice with robotic servants and airships- would have telegraphed that well enough. Shrugs

They told me to consider going into art direction with a view to help advertisers. I got very angry. I had never made anything mid or cosey…. Didn’t get it

Read on the Clients from Hell website: client sent a jpeg of their logo to an illustrator and asked that he return it when he was done because it was their only copy

The gold standard: you put a flashing red graphic that’s says “temp” over a temp effect or place holder and the client always asks “is that flashing red word going to be in the final?”

Cut an animatic for a commercial from drawn storyboards. The client asked if the final commercial was going look like a drawing (I got a million of these after 45 years as an editor)

I was working with Rob Legato when he was one of the VfX guys on Star Trek TNG. He told me an exec from paramount complained about the way the Enterprise moved in one of his episodes. He told the guy “it’s a 6ft model on a stick. I make the stick disappear”

Was in a producer's office pitching my true-life script about a Soviet aviatrix-- highest scoring female ace in history, who died in a massive dogfight. Three notes followed in the email pass: -- Can you make the pilot MALE? -- Make him AMERICAN? -- have him SURVIVE and become a hero.

Umm OkALT: Umm Okstatic.klipy.com

"This would be a great show if you could keep up the quality"

Ah yes, the ruler of Xi'tenta Prime is ... Queen Jennifer.

Apparently it wasn't believable that my main character had a female friend who he risked his life to help, because he also had a wife.

One of our longest form works has been written in second person. We got a very confusing comment on the first chapter where someone helpfully informed me that... we'd written it in second person, but that they hadn't done any of those things.

My second worst was someone in a writing group insisting that contractions were an error in fiction. They grudgingly allowed that contractions might be permissible in dialogue, but certainly nowhere else.

Someone once came up to my table at a convention and told me at some length that it was just wrong that the birds I draw use daggers, swords, etc. because birds already have knives on their feet. 🤣

I think for me, it was Chapter 1 of an old WIP a few years back: “there’s no romance in this chapter.” Uh… because it’s not a romance. Nowhere anywhere did I say my fantasy manuscript was a romance. Even if it was, it’s only Chapter one!

Early in my first job out of school I was asked to do a risk analysis on a piece of military equipment. Then they told me my report was no good because I was "too analytical " 🫠

When I was 17 or so, my beloved English teacher took me aside and said, “You can do so much better that science fiction. But if you must, here’s some quality work,” and handed me CS Lewis’ space trilogy. I dutifully read it and was bored out of my skull, retaining nothing.

OK once a designer added an apostrophe before every single plural s in my copy and was immensely proud of himself for having caught my “error“

Was commissioned to cowrite a children’s musical. It ended with the hero triumphantly climbing the ropes in gym while his former bully, who once ridiculed him for his inability to do it, cheering him on. Was asked: Do we need the rope? (Other than a few chairs, it was the ONLY set piece we needed)

I used to enjoy creative writing in college. My teacher read a short story I submitted and called me in to talk 1-1. She asked if I was on drugs because my story was something “only a druggie would write”.

I deliberately named my aliens using the face roll across the keyboard method

"You're not an artist unless you go to art school." Said to me by an adult family member when I was 10.

I suppose for me it was more of a lack of feedback. My 2D art professor constantly told me my work was "too cartoony". When I pressed him about how I could improve, or what was cartoony about it, man just shrugged and went to help other students.

A publisher said while it was well written, my story--a parody in which Persephone outsmarts Hades to become the leading winemaker in the underworld--"takes the subject of rape too lightly."

A well respected editor once objected to multiple POV in a manuscript because "they didn't do that in the Golden Age."

I was told to replace the word "tchotchkes" in my story about a NYC Jewish family with "bric-a-brac," because gentiles don't know the word "tchotchkes." I should have said "Too fucking bad for them, then" but I was young. But I didn't write explicitly Jewish characters again for a long time.

Baffling not in a bad way, but in a "wait why didn't I think of this" way. Someone told me my world needed more immersive speech, to provide idioms and phrases exclusive to that world. I combined that with another comment on me using obscure words and now half my book is a literacy treasure hunt.

cw for self harm i think? . a good while ago i posted a vent art where my character was struggling against a noose on their neck i got a comment that it "looks like made in 5 minutes in gimp" because "it's BDSM" ?? HUH???

I designed a productivity app. Since people were going to be staring at it all day, I made the background a nice navy blue. One dude in leadership insisted it was a dated, gross, "1970s blue"

I've had someone tell me that my early drafts of my sci-fi book were boring because all the characters got along and had emotional intelligence. He wanted them to be pettier and get upset at each other more often to 'keep them realistic'. I made them even nicer to each other after that.

Should have just called them all John with different, ridiculous last names.

Oh, hey, I actually have one! Back in high school (equivalent. Norway), I wrote a little horror/nightmare story with a very cliche «wake up, be relieved, oops, here come the creepy claws from the nightmare again»-ending. And my teacher just couldn’t understand if it was a dream or not. Well, duh…

Worked on a big space based project. Made a planet, the planet was in full eclipse total shadow, passing before a brilliant sun. Basically a completely black disc, which was requested specifically in the shot brief... Feedback read: "We can't see the shadows of the clouds on the world"

Humor FunnyALT: Humor Funnystatic.klipy.com

I was told once that I needed to have centuries of fictional history and already have pages and pages of lore about the politics and economics of my world before I started the first page of the first chapter. If that was true then I would never write. I find out all that stuff as I go.

Congrats on this post! <3

A player said there should be more younger women NPCs so his character could flirt with them.

I kinda laugh at this one at work where I was told to “punch up” a mail box. I didn’t know what that meant and asked a fellow BG painter so I wouldn’t look stupid. We both concluded this meant tighter rendering. Turns out the lead meant “make the mailbox a more visible color…”

I was working on a game that featured a celebrity I won't name and I wrote a joke about how they were shorter than their partner. Their team rewrote my joke to make the celebrity taller and the partner shorter, as if that would somehow bend reality and alter easily researched facts.

That my anthropomorphic animal who's animal characteristics are a metaphor for disability and society's subtle ways of excluding people who are different "would have a hard time in society. Even going through doors!" Yeah... That's... Why I made her?

Most recently someone told me "Don't be too creative in this genre" after I explained my idea for a book I'm working on.

I was writing software release notes and my boss told me to take out any phrases like "fixed an issue" because it implies the company previously made a mistake.

"This is so full-on words and images for the sake of words and images that it makes no sense" Not because this couldn't be valid critique but because it was wildly different from anything anyone else had said, AND because trying to read her notes I eventually figured out what she MEANT.

so not baffling (bc I know why, Unfortunately) but two worst both came from a creative writing workshop for a class. 1) a lot of "your protag is so unrelatable" when I was one of two non-white people in the class and the only Asian, writing Asian characters

Someone found the only copy of the basis documents for my d&d world and got /really/ bent out of shape by my description of elves as immortal wifty stoners :-)

People criticized one of my works for not covering every single tag I'd marked my story with. In chapter one.

“You charge too much” Yes, this is creative feedback It’s like handing a sculptor a block of marble and saying “you have 1 hour” vs. “you have 1 week” A week’s worth of creativity *costs* a week’s worth of creativity. The client doesn’t know how much the art costs. They just want it cheaper.

I was told in the 3rd grade that I couldn't put purple next to orange and I had no artistic talent. Believed it for way too long.

The most baffling was the editor reaction half way through the first page of my SF MS "theres no hint of SF here" -- um? Not all SF starts on a space ship?? 😒😃

"Too Pussyfied." - - a reader, editor, someone, don't know who, at a surprisingly high quality rag

A couple: "Is this even fantasy?" for a story where a boy finds a surprisingly nice eldritch horror in a basement. Another was that mentioning people's skin tone was distracting, and I should probably only mention if they weren't white, which is something I disagree with for several reasons.

I once got an email with the subject line set to the title of my most recently released story, and the body consisting exclusively of the sentence, "You egotistical bastard."

Mine was a reader complaining about using contractions/colliquilosims in the dialogue in my stories. I wasn’t using “proper” English. In dialogue. Spoken by Appalachian characters.

I wanted to name a vampire character I created “John Stoker” and my work buddies at the time (I don’t work there anymore) said the name “Stoker” was copyrighted. Thing is, I don’t think it is…

I had someone tell me once that they couldn't read my stuff any longer because I made the relationship between the main couple too realistically convincing, and they didn't want to believe said couple would work. Apparently it would have been fine if I'd written them as completely OOC fluff, OR...

I remember sharing an interest in game design with a designer friend of my moms and they looked at my notes and handed me a paper to test my "creativity". When I failed the test, they proceeded to break the rules of their own test and say "Creatives must think outside the box. You can't do this."

I posted a photo online for critique, with the explanation that I was at a bar, the bartender opened the dishwasher and I really liked how the steam coming out caught the light, so I grabbed my camera and started taking photos. One comment just said I should have waited for the steam to clear.

A long time ago, I showed this fanfic author a draft of a fic I was making (ended up throwing that draft away), basically a flashback showing someone important to the protag dying, and they complained that my protag shouldn't know how to lockpick a locked first aid kit... because lockpicking was OP.

“That’s not how pregnancy works” from a male critique partner on a horror story about pregnancy and labor.

I was told that the names in my Star Wars fanfic didn't have the right amount of syllables.

Had an agent tell me they didn't like the title of novel and they thought my screen name would be a better title. So they spent the entire email calling my novel by my screen name in all caps. What?

Was asked to do a short story reading at a local literary event. Someone afterwards commented that it was "almost like a ghost story." Reader, it was in fact a ghost story, announced as a ghost story, and it was the Halloween special event.

I was once writing a story synopsis for a computer game set in WW2, and I used a "skrzynka" as a plot device. "Skrzynka" in Polish means both a crate and a chest, in this case it was a wooden supply crate. The entire story got shot down because why would there be a pirate chest in a WW2 setting.

"This story should have zombies in it. I like zombies."

"My art is not real like realism, cubism and dadaism". Her words, not mine. Little she knew, Dadaism was made to MOCK people who believes other art is real and other isn't.

Not feedback on my work, but I used to be a children's book designer— the go-between an illustrator and the rest of the in-house team. The publisher disliked art showing beards on men ("scary") and the colors green and brown (green was "boring" and brown was "not a color") ???

Creative writing at a racist evangelical HS. We were doing peer reviews and my partner’s comment was “why are you writing about BLACK PEOPLE”. Her tone heavily implied the hard r.

Once had a school assignment to write the first chapter of a fictional story. I wrote from the perspective of a Przewalski's horse, in a herd on the Mongolian steppe, being hunted by nomads. Teacher critiqued "how would a horse be able to tell a story?" 🤦

I was told that I misinterpreted my previous research

“You have to write for an audience if you want to get anywhere in writing!” false. You gotta write what you like, write it well, and not write to market; instead make your own band of freaks and weirdos that love your work. College writing 1 course from a fellow student. I live against his advice.

Not me, but a drama student I knew had points knocked off a performance that was set in Chile as he was wearing trousers, and "Chile is a hot country". It's also the closest mainland country to Antarctica.

That she didn’t want me to “get hurt” simply because the dragon characters I had for a story…didn’t follow DnD dragon color rules.

"Not enough white people"

In college I had creative writing assignments in two classes that I was able to write one story for and submit to both teachers. One gave me an A+, the other gave a C. Many of the things the second teacher docked me for, the first teacher praised. Very eye opening.

Also, not from me, but my partner once had a creative writing professor tell them, with a straight face, that "serious authors do not use melodrama".

More than once I have been told it is unreasonable to expect that the players in the games I spend a lot of time designing and creating storylines and settings for were expected to create characters who wanted to engage with said stories and settings, and not just refuse the call to adventure.

Nurses don't do yoga. It's just not believable.

A workshop spent around 40 minutes discussing the in-chapter paragraph break symbols used in a student’s short fiction piece. No content, just the symbols he’d chosen. I dont remember what he used, it wasn’t even that strange. Something like: ***

Once had someone tell me that my fic had too happy of an ending. It was a very short romance story where the last paragraph referenced a character’s ring sitting on the nightstand while they showered. It was how I implied to the reader the character’s were married. In a romance story. Um.

I had this super incomprehensible rant that I am pretty sure was asking if my story set in Bavaria in 1945 had to have Nazis in it, but I don't think I really understood the rant enough to know for sure what they meant. It was along the lines of 'why do books that are hopeful have bad guys?'

Managing a project once and the Creative Director wasn't happy with one of the illustrations from a freelancer. After several rounds, I asked him what he wanted to see and he said, "I don't know, I can't really explain it." Told the illustrator, we had a laugh, and she quit the project.

More than once, I've been questioned as to why a nerdy character is brown-skinned. Why not, I'd say. Well, they'd say, because they spend a lot of time indoors reading, not getting much sun. Um...

kind of a stretch but I was playing in a D&D/Eberron campaign that was really short lived and one player thought I was bafflingly INSANE for suggesting we “look out the window” to see where the bad guys surrounding our inn were actually located. And not b/c he was afraid of getting shot, either.

“There are too many feelings in this book.”

This is the sort of thing I’d need a shared drink to chat about. But I have some doozies from #ttrpg feedback.

Entirely alien organism approaches. “Hi I’m Greg.”

I was told that my story had too many lesbians. Like one was fine, but the fact that there were a bunch, and that they knew each other. Totally unrealistic.

This next one is a little longer. I had a Creative Writing professor in college who the absolute embodiment of the "ALL SPECULATIVE GENRE FICTION IS BAD" professor cliche. If it wasn't "literary fiction," it was worthless.

In THE IRON DEVILS, I used a deliberately/traditionally mechanical cadence for robot dialogue. I had a beta reader tell me that, because some people mock certain autistic speech patterns by comparing them to robots, it was therefore bigoted toward autistic people to have robots speak robotically. 😵‍💫

I was told that I drank too much water during a conference talk I gave

"No one would ever talk like this" about a line of dialogue I wrote. But it was literally the way I speak. I also get told nobody would act the way my characters sometimes do when I make them do things I would do >.> (might be because I'm autistic)

Quite a few years ago I was part of the creative team for a well-known game property designing an explicitly Asian theme. We were asked if we could tone down the whole Asian thing.

"I, the critique-writer, have never encountered this slightly uncommon usage of an otherwise familiar word, so you must be wrong for using it." The word was "strains," as in, a character was listening to "strains of Bach, being played backwards"

I actually screenshotted the review and turned it into an ad because it was the most hilarious thing I ever received. Bro lost his mind over two gay characters and one non-binary character.

Not craft feedback, but process feedback. Was told by an MFA professor that if you ever found yourself enjoying the writing process, that meant you were producing bad work.

An editor (esteemed reputation, generation + older than me) changed every “Latin America” in my ms to “South America” and scolded me for getting a basic term wrong. (Was discussing a few case studies, including Mexico, famously not in South America)

Either "nobody is interested in what you have to write" (teacher) or "your next movie should be (proceeds to pitch something super personal)" (relative).

”Could you rewrite this (horror related thing) to include (very well known legacy IP character not known for horror at all)?” “I could, I guess.” The legacy IP character was Clippy the Paperclip,

"Wait, these characters are gay? That feels very unfitting for the world-building set up." IT'S A FANTASY! WITH MYTHICAL CREATURES! HOW DOES BEING GAY BREAK THE WORLD-BUILDING?!?!🙄🙄🙄

"What do you mean you're making up game mechanics? No no no no this takes way too much time, just take *anything* that already exists and slap a skin on it to avoid trouble!" For context, I was a game designer and in no way, shape or form a graphic artist.

During drama class were had to practice scenes. The one my partner and I chose was from the Diary of Anne Frank. The scene where she and Peter were discussing their feelings around losing their teenage years to having to hide from the nazis. Someone in the class said I sounded too angry

I’m so sorry, many of these are punchqble offences.

I just got an email today gushing about my games and wanting to talk to me about putting them in some kind of sales platform. I... am not and have never been a game designer...???

I was a high school soph, my first art class, instructor asked why was I there? I said I liked art. He said you're not good at it and you have no talent. It crushed me. I did photo in college for creativity. It took years to get back to making art. But I eventually became an artist and art teacher.

Didn't happen to me, specifically, but some acquaintances of mine were given a uni assignment to write a 2000 word extract of a fantasy chosen one narrative, and all of them were criticised and graded down for... relying on well used tropes like the Chosen One in their narrative. Deranged behaviour

I just did a very convincing guppy impression wha...????

I will always remember the time when my high school creative writing teacher took points off my draft for grammatical errors in the dialogue.

An editor wanted to replace "in her middle" with "in her guts." I wrote back "Are you sure you want me dropping guts into this steamy sex scene?" The reply was something like "OMG NO!!! I DON'T KNOW WHAT I WAS THINKING!!!" Even editors need another mug of coffee sometimes.

I had a reviewer in my MFA program tell me to move to New York and find a Jewish guy to date to improve my work. (I was married at the time to a decidedly not Jewish man.)

My 8th grade art teacher told me I had no artistic ability and to not take art in high school. So I didn’t. But I kept making art. Now I’m not a prolific painter by any means, but some of my paintings sell for over $1200. Check my pinned post and tell me if I don’t have any ability 🤷‍♀️

A teacher told me a space chase that flew through the atmosphere of Jupiter wasn't realistic.

I was designing an album cover (probably a 4000px square) with a dear friend, and made the mistake of letting him sit next to me while I worked on it. He would point to things on the screen and ask that I move them 1 pixel.

“The characters should have been more into the music of the time.” Brother, these are not the hippest characters, they wouldn’t be up on the freshest beats, and what would that add to a murder mystery anyway?

an artist hated me then proceeded to stalk n harass me for 7+ years. The big reason it took me so long to clock what was going on bc they were technically a friend who then got their friends to tell me how "bad" my art is. Literally the only comments used to get on my art , so I believed them💀

I was told by the panel doing my portfolio review in college that my art was too 'dark' (despite the subject matter of that particular assignment being 'dark'). My personal art pieces were also too 'personal.' I dropped out not long after 😅

bsky.app/profile/awkw...

Guest lecturing for a first-year comp class, I showed a report layout I'd done as an example of how writers and editors sometimes have to DIY graphic design. One of the students later took me aside and said, "I found your design insipid."

In the early 2000s, I was working as a French > English translator. I translated the first couple of chapters of a best-selling sci-fi novel, and the publisher got it to a well-known editor of a sci-fi imprint. At a festival in France, he told me that the translation "didn't sound European enough."

"drawing whatever you want is a luxury. just draw what's popular right now. follow the market" - from someone who was SUPPOSED to be a trusted mentor. didn't give me mental health issues that crippled my ability to connect with my own work for years or anything.

Just “it’s pointless” like yeah, that’s might be true, but it’s like pulling teeth getting opinions beyond that

I had written a vocal line that was apparently unhealthy, dangerous, and impossible for a mezzo/contralto because it was too low. I, a mezzo, can sing it comfortably. The other mezzo/contralto in the production could sing it comfortably. Multiple sopranos I sent it to could sing it comfortably.

I was once told by an art professor that there was no such thing as purple clouds. For an abstract piece where I was going for a vibe of a rococo-style palette to capture the vibe of the "Pastoral Symphony" from Fantasia.

I snorted. Um, duh 🙄

In kindergarten, I got bad marks for coloring 🖍 outside the lines! (A friend's mom found out & wouldn't let me color in her coloring books 😞). I guess I was ahead of the times, cuz now it's cool to color outside the lines.

Ooh, where to start? "He wouldn't do that" - referencing a character who had literally just appeared in the story. "A 13 yo male would be seen as a man, not a boy" - in the world *I* made up. Classic: "You use too many commas." This from the same guy who wanted me to change basically everything.

I once had a film production company offer me £50,000 for the rights of one of my books (Megatomic Battle Rabbit) on the understanding that all human characters won't be included. The books about a comic obsessed kid in West Bromwich finding a 6ft talking alien rabbit hiding in his Dad's shed

is your alien civilization even civilized if you don't have to talk to jeff in accounting?

“Have you talked to God about it?”

As a fellow alien creator: No waaay xDD This person had to be a troll otherwise I'm questioning their sanity :'') From now on we shall name our aliens based on the top 100 favourite baby names of the year we created them...

That is pretty awful advice, however (forgive me for the intrusion but) it always tickles me when there’s a group of aliens in a story and ONE has a shockingly normal “human” name. Like, “Avast, flesh creatures! We are H’hghoth, Easu’po, I-i-a-plk-plk-pum, and… OF COURSE… Joel.”

"Draw her naked."

Ah, yes, the mispronounced compliment.

A secondary world fantasy novel I wrote, that was first published in 2010, has some very confused Goodreads reviewers who thought it was set in London. Probably wouldn't happen today?

An A grade and a compliment on my understanding of the elliptical nature of Conrad's writing. For a 6th form assignment where I wrote the arrival and departure of an older Marlow, but skipped the middle purely because I was writing at 3am on deadline day after the pub and ran out of ideas & fucks.

I have received on a few different occasions feedback about a game's design that I wasn't the designer for. Complaints about the game being boring but there was a refusal to engage with a core mechanic of the game.

Creative writing teacher in Uni telling me that I should never write in such a stylized way ever again. It took me so long to take another workshop class and wow, people there are actually trying to make your writing better rather than fit their model

Just a minor thing, but I did comic book fanart as a hobby and posted it on DeviantArt, and a guy told me if I drew this one female character in this one particular costume of hers, it would make my art way more popular and I was like "how?"

LOL I had some rando get mad because my aliens used non-standard pronouns.

My friend and I were developing a script and pointed out a story decision went into misogyny, and the co-producer running point said, "Whats wrong with misogny?"

I put a demo of a puzzle game on itch and one player gave me feedback via discord DM that essentially just boiled down to: "I wish this game was diablo". It literally did not even have combat in it lol

1. I was told by a sensitivity reader that writing a white, trans, disabled protagonist experiencing ableism and transphobia and getting mad about those things was bad because I wasn't digging in as deeply to the experiences secondary characters of color were having with racism.

Not creative, but it may induce cringe anyway: back when I wrote for a community newspaper, I had an editor who insisted on inserting a "literally" into a metaphor about a funding cut leaving a kitchen-table-themed nonprofit with just two legs to stand on. ie, literally two legs to stand on.

I got notes from a producer asking if the serial killer could be changed to the ghost of the granddaughter of Genghis Khan. This project did not move forward, in case that's not clear from the fact I got a note asking to change the serial killer into the ghost of the granddaughter of Genghis Khan.

I was once told to give up on art entirely because I have aphantasia. Technically I still doodle from time to time, but having zero encouragement from anyone has made me want to quit, so now I'm lucky to produce one sketch a month.