It is better to Give than Receive, Part 2: Giving

Some of you have received my crits before, so you know the style of them, I dive right in. I put on my scientist hat and go with “just the facts, ma’am.” I praise when it’s due. I offer advice and examples of ways to clean up the text. It is straightforward and as professional as I can be. Sometimes crits aren’t easy to swallow, and giving them is no piece of cake either. I have a long way to go, but it’s part of the writing process, and nothing makes me see my own work nearly as well as critiquing others.

If you wanted a long, honest breakdown of my critique giving journey, then just read on. If you’re not interested, can I suggest instead Symphony of Science?

I love that one. Seriously, it’s on my iPod.

Learn from my Fail, Critique edition.

My first foray into critiquing land had precious few examples for me to follow, so I went with my masters advisor’s technique. It wasn’t pretty. I was honest but also condescending, which was pretty funny because my English skillz weren’t exactly what one would call, good. Needless to say, my vocabulary hadn’t been dusted off since my high school honors English teacher and I disagreed about something and I quite writing for the next 8 years (what is it about English teachers that can crush the dreams of us youngins?). So I went into that critique with my evil english teacher sitting on my shoulder and the example of my masters advisor to follow. It wasn’t pretty. I was rude, and intolerant of plot points. I said the writing wasn’t that great, and the story was boring. I called it unbelievable, the characters were unmotivated, and every action they took was so far outside the realm of likely as to be ridiculous. I suggested a couple of ways the writing could be tightened (no need for a particular that, and do you have to use the verb gotten? And had gotten? That seemed pretty unnecessary).

And here’s where people say “Wait, those are actually really good things to point out.” True, but it’s never about what we say but how we say it. I was rude. I was condescending. My crit partner had been an English major, dreaming of publishing since early high school (right when mine were being crushed by my inability to enjoy the Scarlet Letter), and he felt like he knew more than me and was embarrassed to have these things pointed out to him. Oh, and I’d also just received the worst critique on my own work ever—this is the “your novel is too amateurish for me to really give you help with it” crit time—so I might have been taking things more personally than usual. I was hurt. It did not go well. I think we both left that crit session as determined as ever that we were completely in the right and the other was a complete moron. Not productive.

We both shelved those projects without any further attempts at revision. Years passed.

We tried another crit group together—amazingly we are still friends even after all of this—and in the second crit group we had an English teacher and another writer who was also a close friend. By this time I was at my current university and had the Advisor with “Humor.” Now, when I say that there is nothing as damaging to your ego as a bad critique, that’s one thing, but when the person giving the critique has stuck their neck out to take you on and then writes things like “this is complete crap and I never want to see a manuscript in this condition from you,” well, it’s pain on a whole new level. He made jokes in my dissertation, he teased, he cajoled, and when it was bad he made fun of it. Yes, he actually made fun of how bad my writing was. He would go through and make hundreds (actually hundreds, Word counts how many comments there are) of scathing comments to detail my shortcomings as a writer and a scientist. And this is the model I brought to my newest crit group.

It took me exactly one critique to realize that you can’t put any humor into a critique. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t make people happier about the feedback. It doesn’t make them see it your way. What it does is hurt feelings, make people lash out and otherwise muddy the water (no matter how accurate the critique is).

The person who received first argued, questioned and generally put on a very stubborn face. After all three of the other writers had exactly the same thing to say (note, the whole group was trying to introduce sense and sanity) this same person wrote us off as crazies.

And that’s when it happened: for the greater good of mankind we were going to make this author see the light of day. We pushed, hoping for some sort of acknowledgment, recognition that we might have read a book or two, and that despite some of our grades in English classes, we knew the difference between who and whom. The writer pushed back.

The next writer to go got an unmitigated tongue lashing by the first writer. It was like blood was in the water, and the sharks were circling. The first writer tore through the others (including me) without any real regard for what was actually written. Note: if you ever see a writer shaking while receiving a critique, don’t ask them to deliver crits to the others. They live on planet OMG they hate my novel and me.

For those of you who have seen crits from me, this is why I always ask what you really want in a critique. It’s because I’ve given honest feedback to someone who was not ready for it. I gave feedback to someone looking for a fan club and thought they could hack it in the real world.

That crit group fell apart because we were working too hard (we met once a week and crited more than 20 pages for each member every week—it was like a second job), and really we were like the blind leading the dumb. We didn’t know anything, least of all how to give critique.

Now, it would be fair to say that there is a difference between honest and tactless, and I’m still learning the art of tact. I’ve read a whole bunch of books on critiques and critgroups. Truly some of the stuff I said didn’t go over well, and while I stand by every critique I’ve ever given, I do wish I could go back to those times and handle certain people better. I feel as much at fault for the tongue lashings the rest of us received because I couldn’t find the right way to tell this writer the bad news.

Here’s what you should learn from my Fail:

It’s not funny to them. Ever. It’s best to approach this with the same decorum as you would a friend who’s just received very bad news, because honestly, unless your crit is “This is ready for the publishers” you are giving someone very bad news. No matter what they really know about the novel, they were hoping it was ready for prime time. The news that it’s not is often devastating.

If the person you are critiquing comes back with excuses and arguments instead of listening to what you have to say, ask them if they are interested in an actual critique. If they say yes, then politely ask them to let you finish. If they can’t hold their tongue, then they aren’t ready.

I see a lot of people ask for brutal honesty on the internet forums, and really, you don’t want brutal honesty. No one does. There’s a difference between “I wouldn’t have kept reading this after five pages if it wasn’t something from a friend” and “This is complete crap, try again.” The first is an indication that for whatever reason—be it voice, grammar, whatever—the book wasn’t holding their attention. The second implies that everything, even the very words, are lacking in the ability to convey a story (which is something that I doubt, just about everything is fixable).

If there was something about the story that you liked, be sure to mention it. It’s much easier to point out the parts of a story that aren’t working than it is to lay hands on the parts that are working.

Brutal honesty is not license to be a d1( K. Brutal honesty means you have to back up every “this is crap” statement with solid feedback (such as your prose needs a major overhaul because you have a serious double verbing problem, or your characters are dropping into and out of character so fast that I’m wondering if there’s a quantum equation of state just for your characters).

It is okay to say “Something here just didn’t work for me, and I don’t know what it is. I’m sorry I can’t be more concrete.” If you are silent, your silence will be taken as an indication that nothing is wrong. So if something is wrong, speak up, even if you don’t know how to fix it. If you do know how, try to give that as well.

And wow, that was another amazingly long post. Hope that helps.

Giving is better than Receiving... some of the time

I am so tired right now. I know everyone’s too busy to make their lives do the things we all want them to, but I’m really just talking about the waking up too much in the middle of the night, went to bed late because I played hockey and my kid just needed a hug at three am kind of tired. It means my judgment is off. Like seriously askew; beyond three sigma (what’s new, right?).

Still, I’m going to talk about critiques. Honestly, or at least as honestly as I can. Today I’ll talk about receiving. Some other time (maybe tomorrow, but probably not) I’ll talk about giving.

I’m working on my logline over at Miss Snark’s First Victim (great resource for writers, by the way). It’s been real eye opening because that’s something I’ve never worked on. Queries, yes, I’ve studied the art of the query (note: art; not science), and I’ve been working on the craft of writing for what feels like forever**. When it comes to critiquing though, Giving seems waaaay better than Receiving. That’s the coward’s response—well, I am a coward—but both sides are important.

Now I’m going to peel back the brain canopy and give everyone a look inside my head when I’m receiving crits (Yes, this is probably TMI, but I’m at three sigma even for me).

::reads first crit:: OMG they hated it! All those nice words were just to butter me up before they tell me that what I’ve written is complete crap. ::rereads logline:: Oh crap, and now I see what they’re talking about! OMG why did I let anyone else read this crap. Honest to Godiva, I might just have to drown my embarrassment in chocolate, wait, what did the next person say? Maybe this critique is an idiot or something.

::reads second crit:: They loved it! Yes! Take that commenter number one! Oh, wait, they have the same advice. Crap, I have to work on it (well, duh, didn’t I just figure that out from the first crit?). Still, this comment seems like they at least maybe like it. Maybe. Oh crap, what if they were just trying to butter me up too? Do I really suck this much?

::reads third crit:: Ouch, they didn’t like it that much at all. Well, at least that’s some really solid advice. Damn, she doesn’t waste any time with the sunshine. ::rereads logline:: Sweet Mother of Science, did I really write that? What part of my brain thought that would work? I’m such an idiot.

::reads fourth crit:: Oh yay, they liked it. But they didn’t say anything about it. Nothing, just “I liked this one” pretty much worthless. Come on people, I can take the truth. I didn’t sign up for an ego pat, I wanted some critiquing.

::reads fifth crit:: Ouch! Careful what you wish for. ::rereads logline:: By the Letters in the Alphabet! What’s wrong with me, why couldn’t I have seen this before???

Note: these crits are not in any order.

So yeah, this is what reading critiques is like for me. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in my crazy up down self deprecating inner monologue of doom. I want everyone to love it, but I also want to know how to make it better. It’s a crazy conflicted place where you’re out there naked and it feels like the world is shooting arrows at you. If you get what you really need (an honest opinion on your work) it almost always hurts—even if they liked it. If you get what you want (“zomg I loved this so much, when’s it going to get to print??), you don’t get what you need.

This is why critiques are complicated, and so very very important. 

**no, I haven't been writing forever, it just starts to feel that way after a surprisingly short period of time

The Whole Package: Part 1 Voice

The Whole Package is a series describing the whole writer. This is part 1 of (n+1) where n equals the number of posts that I think it takes to cover the topic (subject to change)

Finding my voice (or Learn From My Fail)

When I started blogging (not all that long ago), I think I did it because it was the expected thing. I didn’t put too much into it, and I really REALLY didn’t want to be directing agents to my super secret blog where I’ve clearly shared too much, and in all the wrong ways. But when I started blogging what I noticed was that all the blogs I read were written by writers about writing. At first I thought, oh, I’ll use this as a way to update people on what I’m doing. I can just talk about the whole publishing process (and won’t my future fans be pleased when they can read all this crap online?). But then I read somewhere that I wasn’t supposed to post about the trials and tribulations of querying. Besides, it would get boring “I queried agent XYZ today, and I got another form rejection letter.” Yeah, that would get old quick.

*Sigh*

It was hard to put all of that away though. In my mind’s eye, I was just a successful query letter away from finding Agent Awesome, and that was just a tiny stepping stone away from the book deal. I really felt like I was knocking on the door to the greatest party on the planet. But if that’s not what I’m supposed to do in a blog, I decided to play along, but finding something else to talk about, or ways to talk about how the querying process sounded more like a side note in my life and not the crushing defeat that it felt like at the time was grueling.

I had to dig deep and find other things to make it worthwhile. There were blog fests (One of my all time favorites was Elizabeth Poole’s 50 follower blog fest, OMG that was fun) and the friends. There were silly contests. And there was the talking about the process. Lots and lots of talking about the process. What I’ve learned from blogging about my process is that I have no clue how my process works. Every time I think I have a process, I go and do everything differently, and I mean everything. The whole thing was a struggle. Being involved and not talking about how I got my thirtieth (I know that's a baby number for rejections) rejection on the same day where I read about some writer who whipped out a query letter for her first novel ever and landed an agent a week later, that was a struggle. 

But for me, struggling is good.

It’s stupid, but it’s true. I don't like to struggle, and so I do everything I can to not struggle the next time through. I knew I needed to work on my craft (and oh boy, I am not saying I'm 'there' yet). I knew my grammar and storytelling had some issues. I worked. And I started to realize that the project I was working on was not going to cut it with anything shy of a full rewrite. When you find yourself with your back against the wall, the truth will out. With a pile of rejections at my feet, I was able to look at my writing in a new way, and to realize something very important:

I might never be published.

Seriously, I could write awesome stories and through the world’s crummiest set of luck--poor timing, bad ideas, wrong market, not the greatest writing, never finding the right agent, never selling a book, you name it—I could really and truly never be published. It became a real possibility for me.

Before that moment, I’d sort of taken it for granted that given enough time and effort, I could open any door on the planet, and publishing just had a tricky lock. But with my stack of rejections, the other option looked startlingly real.

I guess here is where I should say something like, “No, I haven’t given up. I haven’t even given up on the project that brought this home for me. I’m still writing, and I’m still going to try to get published.” So there’s no need to send in a rescue mission full of chocolate and red wine—I’m okay, I’m just sharing (probably too much, as usual).

In that place where I faced the cold reality that luck, completely beyond my control, is part of the road to traditional publication, I took a step back and looked at what I was writing. I wrote a book I was just sure would take off like a rocket. I wrote it in a way I thought an editor would like. I put it in third person because I thought that’s how the more serious stories are told. That’s “how it’s done” so that’s how I did it. I should have known better. For years I’ve been writing stories to please editors. I have nearly thirty little stories that have, in one way or another, been through the hands of an editor, and not one of those stories has ever pleased the people I’d written them for. Not once has an editor said “Wow, I can see that you wrote this for me, so I’m going to buy it because I’m sure there are tons of other editors out there and they’d like to read this story too.”

Not once. Not ever.

Staring down the barrel of maybe never finding my name in print—at least when it wasn’t right under a title like “Heterogenous alteration of Allende CAIs, constrain parent body alteration conditions,” a real bestseller there, I tell you—I realized I’d been writing everything all wrong. I had a moment where I said to myself, “Well, if I’m never going to be published, then I have a simple choice: I can give up now, or I can write for me.”

And something happened: I found my voice. I’d been suppressing it for years because I thought that the luminaries of publishing would frown on my down and dirty telling it like it is, laugh in the face of tragedy, and flip the bird to any asshole who tells you you're not good enough. My sarcastic tongue could be better put to quoting Hemingway, or at least Silverberg. Wouldn’t my tributes to Frank Herbert at least catch the eyes of the serious editors and agents?

It’s one of life’s most basic lessons, and I continue to ignore it at every opportunity. Do things for you, not for other people. You can sing till you’re blue, but until you sing for yourself you’ll never have anything worth listening to. Writing is no different. I went back through some of my old work and the parts my old crit partners loved were always the places where I let my voice through. Those moments were usually only for a line or two because I had some “serious” writing I needed to do, but every time the me in my writing snuck through, everyone wanted more.

And here’s where things get interesting. So, I’ve started writing for just me, and that means I’ve now alienated some people. Not everyone wants down and dirty, tell it like it is (with a side of humor). There are plenty of people who want the world wrapped in pink tissue paper and carried in a nice little gift bag. I wrote like vanilla ice cream to please as many people as possible, but let’s be honest, I’ve always been a bit more pralines and cream (you know, a tasty blend, with some rough edges).

I know agents and editors always go on about voice, but it really is just that simple: Voice is you. It is the only bit of you your novel really gets to have. The story you’re writing? someone has already written a version of it, probably a couple hundred times. The words you’re using? Those are someone else’s too (unless you’re a word forger, but chances are one of the other 1.6 billion English speakers has come up with it once or twice already). It’s kind of like a building—yes, this is the cheesy analogy to writing—we’ve already made a ton of buildings; mostly buildings are put together with a standard set of building materials: nails, screws, bolts boards, metal I beams, etc.; but every building that is well designed is different. That’s voice. It’s the difference between the Guggenheim and your next door neighbor’s house.

Guggenheim, see, it's all pretty and different.

Possibly your neighbor's house.

The difference is Voice.