CRITICISM

CRITICISM

Or: I Am a Mass of Photosynthetic Cells.

If you're anything like me when I first started out, showing your junk to anyone is like willingly walking into a nightmare. I felt like I did when I sat down in my first lecture hall in college, absolutely sure I'd gotten in by mistake and either my name wouldn't be on the roll, or worse, my name the prof would call my name and yell "Impostor! Impostor!" and the wrath of all things holy and unholy would rain down on me and the hapless nerd sitting to my right.

Then, getting back your junk would be akin to the nightmare realized, eh? Red scratches – no, gouges! – across whole f*cking paragraphs, literally tearing the very soul of your creativity to shreds.

Not-so-Quick fix for this feeling:

If you have truly never critiqued/been critiqued before, and if you're like me (pretending to be braver than you are) online forums and writers' groups allow and often encourage you to observe before participating. Take advantage of this to learn how to take criticism, what constitutes valuable criticism, and how to give criticism.

Some tips on receiving the C word:

·         It does NOT define you. In fact, it has pitifully little to do with you as a person. Especially on online forums, no one knows or cares what you look like or whether you're the CEO of some Forbes 500 company or a high school student. The criticism is about your message. One more time: the remarks are about yo' message! No one is saying you're a bad person. You won't find notes saying "I think you're ugly" or "I really like that floral print blouse; I wish you'd wear it more often". That second note is a sign that you should probably call the popo.

·         Consider the source. Just like you probably won't take medical advice from a website that touts chocolate as the panacea to all communicable diseases (if only, right?), the same wariness can be applied to criticism. Does the dude who made the comments regularly contribute to the forum? Check out his critiques on other pieces. Were the pieces stronger for having implemented his suggested changes? Conversely, does he always have something to say but his comments are off topic, unnecessarily harsh, or simply written to make the writer feel bad?

Consider the source's background to the extent of how it affects your current story. For example, a person who regularly reads or has published stories and books in the genre of your piece may have comments contrary to what others (who don't or haven't) are saying.

·         In a writers' group, you have the advantage of seeing people face to face. Usually this means people will exercise tact, soften their remarks. Still, hearing something is off with your junk can still sting. Again, remember that the comments are about your message, not about you, though comments may often start with "You're using that word wrong" or "You're storyline is so old, I saw it on a cave painting". Think of the "You" in those sentences as simply a word to differentiate you, the mass of cells named Hilda, sitting between the mass of cells named Tim and the mass of cells named Cathy. That "You" does not mean you, Hilda, neurosurgeon and mother of 2.5 children, dreaming of becoming the greatest writer of racehorse love stories of the twenty-third century. Here's a mantra to help overcome reservations about criticism: "I am a mass of photosynthetic cells. Criticism is like sunlight. It may burn sometimes but it will help me grow."

·         Lastly, give the comments themselves fair consideration. You can usually trust a comment or critique from a proven, reliable source or beta reader to help make your piece stronger – that's what the critique process is all about, after all: making the piece stronger, making your message clearer. But trust yourself too. The source or beta reader may not have read all 310k words of your space opera, and the comment may not apply to the grander story arc in your head. Or, you may be experimenting with a new form or style or whatever. And even if 999 out of 1000 beta readers say the exact same thing, you may want to dig your heels in and refuse. Cool. It's your story, your choice (though if 999 out of 1000 people are saying the same thing, chances are your aim is missing your mark). If you believe, beyond any logical way of measuring doubt, that what you've written is exactly what you want to say and how you want to say it, then hold your ground.

BEGINNING

BEGINNING

Or: Bob's Event Horizon

The comments: "This is backstory." or "This is where I stopped reading." Or "Cut these first 2 paragraphs/ 2 pages/ 2 thousand words/ 2 chapters. They're boring/ really boring/ eye-gougingly boring."

What the comments can mean: You've started your story waaaay before anything significant to the plot actually happens.

If you're saying "Nu-uh. I totes started my awesome epic tome on the night Bob the Grandmaster mage was born." Cool. Is the story about his early childhood? His formative years? "Nah, it's totes about how an evil mage takes over his village and kills his parents and he has to avenge them, thirty years later. Oh wait, should I start when his parents die?" Uh… "Or, should I start with a five-chapter description of how he trains to become uber powerful?"

The short answer is no. Did George R. R. Martin's series start with Ned Stark's birth? Or his marriage to Catelyn? Did the Harry Potter books start with the day he was born? Did Hamlet's story start with two scenes showing his father's murder? (The answer to all four is no.)  

Stories start the moment the main character's life changes – as it pertains to *what* the main story is about.

Quick fix:

When you first decided to write the full story – I'm not talking about how you imagined Bob would look like, or describing Bob learning his first spell – I'm talking about that a-ha moment, that epiphany, that heart-quickening, mouth-watering, head-banging-on-desk moment when you shook your fist at the sky – what was the story about? What the f*ck went through your head when you saw Bob's world – not his parents' world, not the village's world, Bob's world – turn bat poop cray cray? Usually, it's the moment when *drumroll* nothing will ever be the same again. Seriously, it's the event horizon of your plot, the moment when there is no turning back, no regaining equilibrium, no return to your world's normalcy. Because up til Ned agrees to leave Winterfell, his world could have returned to normal. Up til Harry meets Hagrid, he could have stayed with his aunt. Up til Frodo decides to leave the shire, he could have stayed comfortable in his hole. Events in their respective worlds would have unfolded, but without these characters. The stories would be about someone else, eh?

Find your character's point of no return. That is the first scene of your story.

Let's put our serious pants on:

Maybe you're sure, beyond all doubt, that you've begun your story at the absolute perfect point. You might still get those comments because your message – the beginning of the story – is unclear. Sure, you may have skipped Bob's birth, childhood, and training years, but did you describe them? Did you include a mini-handbook on how magic works in Bob's world? Did you devote pages and pages to flashbacks describing what his parents used to look like or the topography of his village before and after the massacre and the paragraphs look like "Bob remembered his mother's blood-curdling scream as the black-robed nefarious Archmage of the Twelve Hells, Rizzo, flooded the village with streams of orange and red balls of fiery flaming spheres"?

Or, did you literally drop Bob in the middle of a fight scene that looks like "Bob ducked as a fireball whizzed overhead. It struck a gomba, consuming it in magical purple flames. Bob brushed a tear away, sad for the gomba, and vowed to avenge it as he'd vowed to avenge his parents. Lord Rizzo would suffer in the ninth level of the twelve hells, because the ninth level is where humans go, unless they died between the ages of nineteen and thirty-five. Then they go to the eleventh level. Except for Lord Momo. He got his own level, according to Sir Beemo's treatise on The Levels of Hell for Dummies. But Bob didn't believe in any of that stuff, really. He only wanted… what was it? Oh yeah, vengeance."

Then you kind of started at the beginning, and kind of didn't. The story got buried. Try cutting everything that the reader doesn't need to know *at that moment* in order to understand the scene. Take advantage of a reader's suspension of disbelief and abeyance to move your story forward, always forward (even when using a flashback!). The caveat is there's a time limit. If the comment was "This is all backstory," and your reaction is "No it's not, it's significant later on," then you have missed the cutoff point for the reader's abeyance. In other words, you've either waited too long to reveal the connection, or the connection is not clear enough. And unless you have a magic spell, miracle whole-body lube, or steam-powered giant hamster ball that allows you to slip between the laws of physics, you won't be behind every reader, whispering "Keep reading – it gets better. I swear!" That part you want them to get to? That's probably the start of your story.

Start Here

START HERE

Or: What to do with your junk.

There are many blogs that address how to begin the writing process. And many blogs that show what to do with your polished masterpiece.

This blog is about the limbo in the middle: what to do with critiques you've received.

If you're saying "Wait, whaaaa? Critiques? What meanest thou?" – then you're a bit behind what I'm going to blog about. 

Fear not, here are some Quick Fixes: 

1.      Join a writer's group in your area. 

        One that allows you to share a few pages per week/biweekly of your junk and offers criticism that's appropriate to your comfort level. Take your coffee black? Cool. Find people who aren't afraid to get in your face about what your writing is saying. Need a little hand-holding? Cool. Find people who can give it to you. By no means stay with a group that doesn't meet what you need where you're at, but remember: change is good. Opinions are valuable. And growth can be painful. Writing is trying to get an idea from your head into someone else's and people, not websites, not books, can tell you where the message is getting garbled.

2.      Join writers' forums. 

      I was going to tell you to google them and check it out yourself, but my beta reader told me I should actually be helpful. So before I post a short list of them, here are some tips on getting the most out of writers' forums.  

·         There are perhaps dozens of writers' forums. In your zeal, you may be tempted to go buck wild and join ten, even twenty. If you've invented a machine to bend space-time physics to accommodate this, go for it. If you're still operating under Earth's current laws, have some care in which you choose to join. Getting the most out of a forum requires a serious investment in your time. For some, an hour a day, maybe more. Choose wisely, grasshopper.

·         How you ask? Many, if not all, don't require membership or a password to browse its contents. For me, I want an established forum with hundreds of members who contribute regularly. I can see this on the first page – how many topics are discussed ie. Poetry, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Western? How many threads/posts are within each subject – less than a hundred? Thousands? Egad, hundreds of thousands? The higher the better. How many members? There are always off-topic subsections in the forum, but are most of the topics useful to my level of writing or better? Most importantly, will I be able to post my junk and get critique and, just as importantly, will I be able to give critique and not be poo-pooed for my observations and opinions?

·         Some final tips on forums: You may have been published already. You may be the best writer in your creative writing class at school – your teacher said so! – and think you're the sh*t. You may even be God's gift to literary awareness. Awesome! But that attitude don't fly in forums. Seriously. The one and only rule I will ever say is absolute on my blog is this: Respect your fellow writer. Seriously. An online persona affords anonymity and can tempt one to type without thinking. Or perhaps a fellow member says something that you know, deep down in your primordial mitochondrial DNA, is wrong. It's fine to respectfully state your own knowledge but use tact. Because…

·         On the receiving end of a critique on your junk, it can hurt to have your writing mocked or ridiculed. That may not have been the intent, but it can be received that way, especially without the aid of facial expression or voice to soften the message. Forum members will advise you to "grow a thick skin" so the delivery of the message doesn't blind you to the message itself. I know, mixed metaphor right? Anyway, do unto others, Wiccan three-fold law, etc…

Writers' Forums:

AW Watercooler

Fantasy Faction

Mythic Scribes 

(I'll post more after I check them out)

If you're saying "Cool, J. I got my marked up story. Bring it on!" – high five.