Tagged: critique

Seeing Patterns

While we type away on As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #2 the feedback has stared coming in on As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1, and we have detected a potential pattern. Well, a couple of patterns. For one, our readers are saying a lot of the same nice things about the writing. For two, and more important, they appear to be in agreement about some opportunities for improvement.

Getting feedback is essential, but it takes a little practice to learn how to apply it. The temptation can be to try to “fix” everything that each critiquer pointed out, but you’ll end up running in circles that way when they all bring up different, often contradictory things. So, don’t let the trees block your view of the forest.

What’s important is patterns. If more than one person mentions the same thing, it’s probably significant. During the critique group meeting, did anyone go, “Oh yeah, same here,” when someone else raised a point? Then that point’s probably important. Sometimes you’ll have to analyze the aggregate notes to find the pattern. And sometimes you’ll have just make your own decisions about which suggestions make sense to you. You’re allowed to disregard anything anyone says. Better to leave your own mistakes in the story than to swap them for someone else’s.

Going over the feedback with a partner is extremely helpful. They bring another set of eyes and ears to catch those patterns, plus they’re a sounding board for figuring out which ideas help the story and which ones don’t. Working with a partner gives you a backup gut-check about which notes to disregard.

A writing partner helps you detect patterns in the data, and helps you understand what they mean.

Even The Best Advice

It is vital for writers to seek feedback, from beta readers and also from our fellow authors. Finding out what works and what doesn’t is the only way to get better. But, you need to bear in mind that all this input is coming through a filter, and ultimately it’s up to you to decide which notes to apply and which ones to disregard.

When you get input from another writer, it’s usually them saying you should do it the way they would do it. It might not be phrased with quite such blunt honesty, but when anybody gives advice about anything, how else can it work? Your colleagues are trying to share the benefit of their experience. They mean well. But if you’re not careful, you might get steered toward someone else’s voice and vision.

When you collaborate with a partner, you have someone telling you to do it the way you do it, only better. Your partner has an intrinsic sense for how things are intended to come across, and thus won’t offer advice that leads you astray. Jen and Kent are co-authors, but a similar partner dynamic could exist between, say, a writer and an editor. The key is that you’re teammates with a shared vision, so when you advise each other you’re honing in more strongly on the desired end-product, not diluting or distorting it.

Working with a partner is not a substitute for seeking outside feedback, and you really should listen with an open mind to the comments and suggestions other people offer. That same remove from your work that imposes a filter also lends perspective. They’ll see things that you and your partner missed due to being too close to it. Gathering and processing outside feedback together with your partner helps in identifying which notes are important.

A writing partner is like a voice inside your head, but in a good way.

We’re Up!

Our critique group’s most recent meeting (which we hosted at our house) took us up to the finale of the other member’s manuscript that we’ve been discussing. So, now it’s our turn in the hot seat once again.

Critique sessions are a whole separate animal from having beta readers (which we do, also). There are lots of different ways to run a group, but here’s what works well for us.

  1. choose one manuscript to focus on
  2. the author provides a chunk of pages in advance, and whatever guidance they wish regarding the kind of feedback they’re looking for
  3. at the meeting, each member shares input and suggestions, asks questions, etc. about those pages
  4. avoid spending a lot of time on typos and other picky things

Note that this means no one can read ahead, so the author can gauge how well the clues are working, how readers feel about the protagonist at each stage, etc. It’s up to the author how much to reveal, which questions to answer, and so on. Rune Skelley tends to be very tight-lipped. We enjoy getting the rest of the group trying to guess what we’re up to.

Another thing that’s up to each author is whether to bring stuff in before the whole book is written. We’ve done it both ways, and found reasons not to share works-in-progress for critique anymore. For us, the feedback only muddied things at that stage. But some folks thrive on it, and use the requirement of handing out pages by the next meeting as a motivational tool. Do what works for you.

The best part of any critique group meeting is when members start debating what the pages mean and basically forget that the author is there. As the author, that provides a ton of insight into what’s working and why. It’s also nice when your fellow writers come right out and tell you what they thought was effective, or where they felt something needed more work. Just be sure not to settle for “it was good” — these are your colleagues, so they should be able to articulate their reasons for responding a certain way.

A writing partner is someone who kicks Kent under the table when he’s about to blurt out a major spoiler.

The Art of Critique

Just like anything else, getting good at providing feedback to a fellow writer takes practice. To save you a little trial and error, here we offer some tips on how to go into the meeting prepared. (Note that our advice is specifically calibrated for fiction. Some parts of it may generalize well for other forms of writing, but use your own judgement about what to apply.)

1. Start by reading the submission straight through without marking anything. Don’t try to reverse-engineer it yet. Don’t look at it through your author goggles, just read it. Approach it as if you selected it as a pleasure read.

2. Then read it again, with a pen this time. Mark typos if you wish, but remember that critique is not proofreading. It’s more valuable to share what questions come into your mind as you read. Was there something that seemed confusing at first, but now that you’re on the second time through you get it? Tell the author that’s what happened. Your annotations should amount to you “thinking out loud” about what you’re reading.

3. Critique also isn’t all about finding problems. Positive feedback is important too! Mark turns of phrase that you particularly like. Call out good structural choices. The key to giving good notes well is to say not only “I like this” but also why you like it.

4. Write a summary of your impressions. This could be on the back of the last page if you’re working from hard copy, or it can be the body of an email if your group uses electronic formats. This is the place to answer any specific questions that the submitter posed. Offer suggestions, but don’t do a rewrite.

Now, about item #1. It’s not so easy sometimes! Becoming a writer can sort of ruin you as a reader, because your mind is on technique the whole time you’re consuming the text. Analyzing rather than appreciating. Learning how to turn down the volume on that voice is a useful skill. Another challenge is when the submission’s genre or subject matter is simply outside of your tastes. Except in the most extreme cases, you should be able to put yourself in the target reader’s shoes and provide valid feedback. But it’s a good idea to let the author know that their manuscript was something you wouldn’t ordinarily have chosen on your own.

All About Give and Take

A member of our critique group has sent pages out, and we’re very excited to read their material. It’s great to have something to analyze besides our own words once in a while.

The obvious way you benefit from being part of a critique group is that you have extra sets of eyes on your pages. Getting feedback about your work is crucial. But, you can also learn a lot from being the one providing the feedback, if you put forth the effort to do a quality job of it.

Good critique isn’t proofreading. It gives the author a map of where their words took you at each stage of the journey, where you felt different emotions, when you had felt like the logic didn’t add up, which moments were your favorites. Why you love (or love to hate) the characters. And by articulating these thoughts about another’s manuscript, you’re sharpening tools for use in your own writing.

Do you have a critique group? Use the comments to tell us what you like best about belonging to it.

Getting The Band Back Together

We’ve been in a critique group for years. If you don’t have one, you really should look into it. Feedback from fellow writers can be amazingly helpful, and in fact just hanging out with fellow writers feeds the soul on so many levels. And, the need to bring pages in for group can be a great motivator for those who work best under a deadline.

Obviously, meeting has been a challenge for the past year and a half. We set up a Zoom routine that’s helped us keep things rolling, and now that our members are all vaccinated we’re finally starting to talk about gathering in person again. It seems like that might take us a while to figure out, because we’re a klatch of writers and not a team of logistics experts. Meanwhile we can still do video meetings.

Writing with a partner is sort of like having a built-in critique group. Being able to sound out ideas and just converse with another person who gets it becomes baked-in as part of the process. Still, you need to try your work out on people who didn’t write it.

A writing partner is someone who makes sure you’re not on mute (and sometimes makes sure that you are).

Critique Group Advice — Part 3

Sharing your work with readers is the ultimate goal for most writers, and one of the best ways to improve your writing is to share it with fellow writers through a critique group. We’ve been in a group for a very long time, so now we’re sharing our experiences with you in order to help you get the most out of your own group.

First things first: join a critique group. We feel that an in-person format is the best way to go. Check out the scene in your local library or indie bookstore. There might be established groups looking for members, or you might be able to start your own. You could also do a search for “online critique group” and learn about other options if the local scene isn’t panning out.

Now, a word of caution when processing the input that your critiquers provide: don’t try to please everybody. Gathering input is the whole purpose of going to the meetings, but that doesn’t mean all the input is valid. You’ll probably need to develop some filters to separate the signal from the noise.

One thing Kent and Jen always do is take their own notes during the meeting. This can be jotting down specific comments from the critiquers, but also often includes little signposts for later to help us remember how we felt about these ideas in the moment. There’s a huge difference between “punch up descriptions” and “do we really need to punch up descriptions?”

By the way, this is another area where working as a team gives us an unfair advantage. There are twice as many ears to take in the commentary, and we have each other to check in with when deciding which notes really require action.

You might be wondering why it’s so important to be in a group if you can’t take their feedback at face value anyway. One of the first things you want to do is check for patterns. Did more than one person have the same concern? That’s a sign that you do need to look into it. Just be alert for people chiming in who only “had the same problem” after someone else brought it up.

And as you get to know the other members it will become easier to filter, and hear between the lines. It’s not a binary thing, where each comment is either an obligation or something to disregard. Ask yourself, “why would Jack tell me to repeat this description?” If the details in question were mentioned in the previous block of pages that you sent through the group, and you feel it would be too repetitive, then trust your gut. People often have trouble recalling all the particulars from earlier sections, something that’s far less of a factor for real-world readers who will have the whole book all at once. But if Jack has a really sharp memory and he was also talking about deepening the mood, maybe his real point was that repeating a particular image resonates with the main character’s dilemma. Or something.

It’s your book. If you give the comments honest consideration, but you disagree that the changes are advisable, then don’t make changes. However, don’t argue about it in group. Smile and say, “sure, thanks,” or “I see, okay.” Then think it over later and decide for yourself.

A critique group is a vital way for you to grow as a writer.

Critique Group Advice – Part 2

As our regular readers know, we believe strongly in not going it alone. For us that means writing together. But even if you don’t have a writing partner, you still need help sometimes, and that’s where your network of fellow writers comes in.

Okay, so you’re going to join a critique group, or maybe even start your own. Fantastic. Last time, we covered some very general ideas such as schedules and ground rules. Now let’s dive into some details.

Practical decisions such as how to distribute work can have a big impact on the effectiveness of the group. What we’ve found to work well is sending out the chapters ahead of time via email. Give your members enough time to read the pages twice if they want, and remember it takes longer when you’re adding notes as you go. In some groups, each author reads his or her own work aloud. There’s nothing wrong with doing that, if you have the time, but we’d caution that the author’s bias and familiarity can mask issues with the grammar. Places where a “real” reader might stumble, whereas the rehearsed recitation will smooth it out.

How many pages to send at one time is also an important question. Smaller chunks lead to more detailed critique, while larger sections let your group’s members get into the flow of the story. The more material you expect to cover in a meeting, the more disciplined you’ll have to be about staying on-topic. (This can be a serious problem at any gathering of writers. We’re creative types; we know lots of things; we love words.)

A final note about the work being brought to group: how complete should it be before you start? There’s no one right answer, of course. Some people like to get hot feedback on a work in progress, or use the meeting schedule as a way to impose deadlines and stay productive. That’s awesome if that’s what works for you. Our personal experience has taught us not to take our stuff in too early. It made us second-guess ourselves too much. The feedback has been consistently more useful to us when it was collected after we had the first draft done.

More of our thoughts on critique groups still to come. Have advice or experiences to share? Add a comment!

Critique Group Advice – Part 1

Our critique group met last night, which is always a highlight of our writing life. Firstly because our fellow writer friends are awesome, and secondly because it’s fascinating to find out what your words do inside other people’s heads.

If you don’t have a group, get one.

There are lots of ways to run a critique group, and our way isn’t the only proper way. But we can offer a bit of advice based on our experiences.

Give it focus. For us this means we tell all prospective members up front that we only critique fiction. Not poetry, not self-help, not cookbooks, not screenplays, not… Just fiction. This isn’t our snobbery showing through (we keep it buttoned up a little better than that). We just realize that we, personally, couldn’t offer top-notch feedback to poets. It would come down to simply whether we liked or disliked each piece, and that’s not very valuable. You could get even more focused and limit your group to a single genre, or to novel-length works, or short stories, only. How restricted your focus is will depend somewhat on the size of your local writing community, and how many members you’d like your group to have. In our experience it works best to have about 5 or 6 members. More than that and it’s hard for everyone to have a chance to give in-depth feedback. Fewer than that and meetings tend to fall apart if even one person needs to miss a week.

Should you meet weekly? Bi-weekly? Monthly? That’s up to you and your group. The important thing is to have a schedule. Everyone can mark their calendars and arrange their lives around your meetings. Plus, a set schedule motivates you to keep working.

Set ground rules. For instance, treat each other’s work as confidential; critique the writing, not the author’s beliefs; keep things constructive and encouraging, but don’t pull your punches about problems you see in the text. Spell out these group expectations. It might feel a little formal, but trust us when we tell you that it’s important. (If you get awesome members, none of it will ever be an issue. But you still need to all be on the same page about how the group operates.)

We’ll talk in more depth about some of those guidelines, and other critique group lessons we’ve learned through the years next time. If you have advice to share, pop it in the comments!

 

That Barely Hurt A Bit

r-avatarWe have a large pile of marked-up pages from taking the Music Novel through our critique group, and we mentioned recently that the process of digesting all that input is something we find cumbersome. Happily, it turned out that a fairly simple workflow adjustment made things go very smoothly for us this time, so all of that valuable input is now added to our Scrivener project as comments. We’ve even made significant headway on addressing it.

What was this radical innovation in critique-copy processing? We ran it in parallel rather than in series. Instead of picking up a single review copy and going all the way through it, then doing that with the next one on the pile, and so on, we grabbed all the copies of a chapter and spread them on the ottoman at once (where we had room to turn all their pages — the auxiliary writing cave has a big ottoman). Not only was it more efficient mechanically, but it allowed us to compare the notes immediately when different readers commented about the same thing.

If, on some future occasion, we devise a more interesting solution to this issue you’ll certainly read about it here. But for now, simple is best.