Why do writers seek out other writers to critique their work? I suppose there are as many reasons as there are writers, but I believe the desire to be read ranks pretty close to the top. Without peer review, what eventually makes it to the printed page is little more than a silent scream. Writers must be read. It’s simple, it’s elemental, it’s required. I once read somewhere that a physician who diagnoses himself has a fool for a patient. I suspect the same thing applies to writers who critique their own work. We need someone on the outside looking in if we’re to grow.

As a writer I participate in both live session and online critiques. Before you accuse me of being a masochist, know this: the more I critique, the more skilled and diversified I become as a writer. The more I am critiqued, the more tolerant and appreciative I become of both the limitations and gifts of other writers I’m exposed to. Critique is a necessary and important part of any writer’s life who is serious about craft. Period.

There are significant differences in live versus online critique; the most obvious being it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever get beat-up in the parking lot for hitting “post my review” on a keyboard. It can be tempting to take cheap shots online, because, after all, it’s completely anonymous. I would caution you about that. The only person you’re hurting is yourself.

When you open your mind to constructive criticism, even though it stings a little sometimes, you learn things. Before you know it, you’re navigating your way through nests of dangling participles and clipping comma splices with the best. You don’t have to like another writer’s style or story content to critique it effectively if you strive to be objective. I guarantee you will learn something. In order to be a good critiquer, you must also be a good critiquee. (I’m not sure those are actually real words, but you get the point

Don’t become one of those people who delights in finding every little flaw and jumping on it like they’ve found a fly in their soup. Other people are going to critique the same piece. Leave a little meat on the bone for them. Look for the good and break bad news gently. “Suggest” changes rather than arbitrarily rewriting a person’s piece in your own image. No one likes a show-off or a line editor tampering with their “baby.” If there are strong and compelling reasons for suggested changes based on technique, grammar and mechanics, people will listen and they will thank you for it.

You’ll know you’re getting the hang of it when you realize you are learning at least as much critiquing the work of others as you are from being critiqued in return. Suddenly, slogging through those bothersome critiques isn’t such an onerous task. You’re discovering things in other people’s work you can apply to your own. Understanding dawns. Congratulations, and welcome to the difficult and rewarding world of serious writing effort.

Now for the bad news and the Achilles heel of online critique. There is no known defense against the drive-by critique. You know the type. Looking to have their own egos assuaged at the expense of others, they do the minimum. Spewing mindless platitudes, they pepper the “comment required” boxes like a Mac-10 with their vague and unsubstantiated garbage. Take comfort in the sure and certain knowledge that they won’t be around long. Good writing is hard work, and ultimately, they’ll want no part of it.
Writing is art and critique is the canvas. Some of us strive to paint masterpieces, others are happy with stick figures. All took the time to write something. Surely that deserves respect.

By Vance H. White
(darkeyes)

Vance H. White is a published short story author and award winning essayist residing on Northwest Florida’s Emerald coast. Vance divides his time equally between writing, pestering New York agents to publish his latest effort, and co-chairing a critique group of talented local authors.

Receiving critiques of your work is difficult as an author.  First you have to get past the idea that your writing has problems, because almost all writing does.  Or perhaps you have the opposite problem, and will need to get used to the idea that your writing has good points.  That sounds like it’d be a lot easier to do, but sometimes it can be quite challenging.

In any case, learning to take critiques well is something you’ll need to do quite soon as a budding author.  Even if you never plan on publishing, and are content to write fanfiction (or whatever) for the love of the craft, critics are a dime a dozen.  And as the old Dr Demento song goes, I’m looking for the guy who’s applying the dime.

When you first get the critique, it can be tempting just to ignore the whole thing.  Obviously the critic has no idea of the work you put into the story they just tore to shreds, the tears of blood you shed as you penned out your masterpiece of the heart!  What do they know?  They’re just some [loser on the internet / talentless hack critic / guy on the street / creative writing teacher]!  They wouldn’t know the work of an author if it hit them in the face, right?

Well, not quite.  As author, it’s part of your job to respond to criticism in a way that improves your work.  Otherwise, what’s the point?  More so, when still unpublished, you should look at critiques as a way of gauging audience reaction, and as a trial-by-fire for that scary day when you’ll send your manuscript off to an agent.  A few painful suggestions now is worth a “We would like to publish your novel,” isn’t it?

This can be hard, especially when the critic isn’t particularly tactful.  But in all except the worst of critiques, you can find something to take home with you.  It may not be something you enjoy learning, but it will be something.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should just blindly accept whatever anybody says about your story, either.  That way lies madness and endless revisions, a never-ending cycle of bitterness and “improvement” that usually leaves a manuscript even more mangled than when it started life.

You have to pick and choose what’s useful and what’s not.  Remember that you as the author of your story are the only person who’s… well, the author of your story.  What everybody else is telling you is just a suggestion.  Don’t blindly change everything people bring up, or you’ll lose that control.

So how do you walk the line between these two extremes?  With extreme caution, that’s how.

Or there’s always the strength by numbers method:  If one person says they don’t like something, and you liked it, by all means leave it.  If five or six people say the same thing, though, it might be time to break out that red pen and mark a line through it.  It will hurt to do, but if it’s not working for that many people, it likely won’t work for many others, either.

Stewart B.
thestripedone

One of the hardest things about writing is being able to do it consistently. Every writer knows the pain of dreaded “writer’s block,” which can strike at any time and for a variety of reasons. There’s no easy short-cut to get rid of it, of course, but there are ways you can get around those terrible periods where nothing you write turns out well and you lose all motivation.

One way is to just make a habit of writing a certain amount every day, no matter what. Many famous writers have used this method to ensure that they have a reasonable amount of output, and it can be especially helpful if you’re writing longer works that just seem to drag on and on. It can be difficult to keep going sometimes when you’ve been working on a novel for a month and realize you’re only about 1/5 of the way through it.

If you write every day, it will eventually become habit, and habit is a powerful tool in the human arsenal. The way our brains are wired means that things we do every day become second nature, until eventually it’s not a struggle to find the time to write out those words. Instead, it becomes just something you do, and something that you’ll account for in your daily schedule.

I’ve been struggling with this aspect of writing myself for quite a while. I started a novel last June, wrote 5000 words in a few days from the initial rush of excitement, and then… well, stopped. It sat untouched until December, when I wrote another 1500 words and stopped again. This May, I sat down and restarted the novel from scratch, rewriting what little beginning I’d done.

But this time, I did something different. I made myself write at least 500 words a day, with a preference for more. I told people I knew I was working on it, so that I’d have some kind of external motivation when they asked me how it was coming along. It’s now the end of June, and I have about 40,000 words with more every day.

I hope to finish by the end of August, which means I’ll have to churn out roughly 1000 words a day for the length I have in mind. It’s a tall order, but I’m hopeful. Now that I’ve been doing my daily 500 words for a while, it’s not nearly as hard. Even when I have periods (and I do still have them) where I hate every single word that goes from my pen to the paper, I still churn them out, where before I would get discouraged and quit. Habit is a powerful tool.

Some famous authors who wrote habitually:

• Virginia Woolf - 1000 words a day
• Kingsley Amis - 500 words each morning
• Isaac Asimov - Woke at 6am and wrote all day, sometimes until 1am
• Haruki Murakami - Writes 5-6 hours a day when working on a novel

Obviously, the more prolific writing schedules (Asimov, for instance, published over 500 books in his lifetime) are not for everybody. But even setting aside an hour a day, or setting a small word count goal, will help improve your output’s quantity. And since “practice makes perfect,” it’ll eventually improve your writing, as well!

Stewart B.
thestripedone

by Matt Toler

Last October, shortly before finishing the first draft of my novel, Treadpath, I attended a talk by Coraline and The Graveyard Book author Neil Gaiman in Chicago. The Q&A session at the end largely consisted of questions about writing and process. When asked whether a new writer should write short stories or novels, Gaiman responded along the lines of: “I’d recommend short stories, because it’s important to be able to finish.” I sat there and thought “Dammit, I’m doing it backwards.”

Treadpath began as an amalgamation of the “what if…?” daydreams of bored college library employee and the sort of tribute that’s sometimes required of someone who has been genuinely moved by an experience. I always tell people that I never cared whether it turned out to be a bestseller or even something that could end up published, it was just something I had to do. So, armed with a bundle of loose concepts and an ample amount of drive, I set out to unconsciously make the journey to a completed novel as miserable an experience as possible.

There’s an exquisite sort of self-loathing that comes from re-editing eighty pages to convert the story from first person to third person. There’s a strange sort of satisfaction that comes from throwing away forty pages that don’t fit the outline that only bothered to put itself together once far too much had already been written. I liken these processes to my chosen career as a graphic designer, where the self-editing is all visual and on-the-fly. I have to have something to work with, a content base, before I can start building the final product. With the novel, this became a labor-intensive process because there was no other source for the material other than what I could put down in a night or a weekend.

I imagine that a lot of people who set out to write a novel end up doing what I did for the first three years of the project. I’d take it out and mess around with it for a few weeks, decide it was too much of a mess in its current state and shelve it again. It could even be that some people can actually finish a book that way. I can’t. I had to really ask myself what I wanted out of the project and what it was going to take to finish it. My answer came in the form of spending two to three hours a night after work during most of 2008 stitching together the old pieces, filling in the gaps in the early parts and then finishing the damn thing off.

I made a couple of promises to myself. I promised to stick to my outline, which I strenuously reworked until all the pieces fit. I promised myself that the hard part was getting the thing down and not worrying about every little detail on the first pass. This was a lie, but it kept me going to believe it.

It became apparent soon after reading my first draft that I wasn’t going to be the type of writer who can generate finished material on the first try. The first round of edits may as well have been a new novel for all of the fixes that took place. Each subsequent round got shorter (I ended up doing four) but there came a point where I became aware of the possibility of overworking the material. That’s where I stopped.

So now I’ve got this manuscript. I consider it a readable, if still somewhat flawed, piece. I don’t see it being taught in English 101 two hundred years from now, but it tells the story I wanted to tell, which was my goal. I’m considering sending it to a literary agent since I don’t relish the idea of paying an editor on my own. I’m considering self-publishing. I’m considering donation-based digital distribution. For the moment, I’m content to send the finished product to my friends and family as sort of an ultimate token of gratitude.

I learned that there’s a momentum to the process that’s almost addictive when it’s working correctly. I learned that reading your words out loud is a quick and painful way to determine whether a passage is working. I learned that there’s a price to be paid for getting the first draft down quickly. I re-learned three quarters of my high school English education. I learned that you have to trust your reader. I learned that there’s nothing in the world like holding a printed and bound work in your hands and knowing that the thing is, for better or worse, yours and may outlive you.

Good luck, fellow writers. I’m looking forward to learning from all of you.

Matt Toler lives and works in Chicago as a graphic designer. He took a break from writing political and social rants on his blog to finish his first novel, Treadpath. It is currently unpublished.

by Annette Lyon

Several years ago I sat at a general session of a writing conference during a Q&A. I was surprised at the kinds of questions asked, things that were, I thought, obvious.

Then it dawned on me that four years prior, I hadn’t known the answers to those very same questions. Of course not; I had to learn them just like everyone else. I had really learned a lot over the last few years.

In the same vein, I’ve been surprised recently at some manuscripts that have crossed my editing desk, or rather, I’ve been surprised at the format of some of them. They’ve had some really basic problems, and I finally clued in why:
The writers just hadn’t learned yet. It’s not like there’s a writer fairy that bestows knowledge about things like formatting the moment you declare you’re a writer.

So in light of that, I thought I’d do a refresher on some basics about manuscript formatting. It’s something I think we often overlook, focusing instead on craft. But really, how your work looks will be the first thing the agent or editor ever sees.
If it’s wrong, you’ll look like an amateur, and that’s not the best way to make a good impression.

While publishers and specific types of manuscripts vary (screenplays, etc. are very different), in your average novel, you’re pretty safe using all of the following:

• One-inch margins. That means all around: top, bottom, left, and right. A bigger margin (say 1.25 inches—1.5 at the most) is fine, but never go smaller than one inch.
• Twelve-point font. Don’t go bigger, and don’t go smaller in an attempt to fit stuff onto the page.
• A standard font, like Courier or Times New Roman. In the past, Courier was the standard, but that was in the days of typewriters, when editors needed a good way to estimate word counts. Courier was good for that, since every letter takes up the exact same amount of space, whether it’s an I or an M. Nowadays, Courier is still fine, but Times New Roman is also popular and accepted—and for some editors and agents, preferred, since it’s a bit easier on the eyes. Just don’t use some funky script or cutesy font.
• A header at the top of each and every page. On the left side, it needs to have your title (or an abbreviated version of it) and your last name, such as: SPIRES OF STONE/Lyon. This way, if manuscript pages get separated from the whole, the editor will still know which work—and which author—it belongs to.
• Page numbers, beginning with 1, on every single page, preferably top right.
• Basic contact information on the first page, top left. Including your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address. You can also include a fax number. Single space this part.
• Approximate word count. Either immediately under your contact information or flush right at the top of the first page.
• Indent the first line of every paragraph by tabbing over once. Never, ever use the space bar to indent a paragraph.
• Create a new page for the beginning of each chapter. That doesn’t mean hitting “enter” sixteen times until you reach a new page. It means using control-enter to create a hard-page break.
• Use italics instead of underlining, which is another fossil from the typewriter age.
• Don’t use all caps or bold. Leave those for blogs, e-mail, and non-fiction.
• Do ellipses properly. Always be sure there are only 3 dots, and each one has a space before and after it, like this . . . (Sometimes Word will try to smash them all together. Undo it.) The one exception is if the ellipses land after a full sentence. Then you’ll have four dots, because the first one (with no space before it) is acting as a period.
• Know how to create an em dash, and use it properly. Don’t use a hyphen (or two hyphens) in its place. In Word, use control+alt+the minus key or type two hyphens, the next word, and a space. The hyphens should turn into an em dash.
• Use plain white paper.
• Print on one side.
• Put ONE space after a period. Two spaces is another hold-over from typewriters. Today publishers expect just one.
• Double space throughout (except for your contact information on the first page).
• Don’t include a copyright notice. That makes you look paranoid and unprofessional. Editors and agents know the copyright laws and that the moment you set your work into a tangible form, it’s already under protection by law.

You want the editor to notice your story, not your formatting. If you follow these basic guidelines, the formatting becomes invisible, and you’ll look polished and professional for that very first impression.

Annette Lyon is Utah’s 2007 Best of State medalist for fiction and 2007 Whitney Award finalist. Her sixth novel, Tower of Strength, will be released March 2009. She edits for Precision Editing Group and blogs at The Lyon’s Tale.

by J. Scott Savage

I have three tools of the trade I use a lot. In Stephen King’s great book, On Writing, he describes a toolbox every good writer should carry. You may not need every tool every time you write, but it’s great to have them when you need them. Some tools you use more than others. For me, my Phillips screwdriver, pliers, and hammer are isolation, disorientation, and misdirection.

These are the tools I break out when I want to raise the tension in one of my novels. They are often the key components of a thriller, but as you’ll see, they are just as important in other genres as well.

First of all, let’s take a look at how these tools fit into the toolbox as a whole. In any story with a plot (so really anything other than hardcore literary fiction, which according to Orson Scott Card is just another genre) your main character must have a goal. Preferably a noble goal, so the readers will root for them, but that is not a hard and fast requirement. Second, your reader must care about your protagonist. Third, there must be some kind of negative consequence if the protagonist does not accomplish their goal.

Pretty basic stuff, right? In order to save the townspeople, Sir Coughalot must duel the dragon, find the cup, and return it to the palace before the plague of bad breath is complete. I’m not sure how much we’d like a hero named Sir Coughalot. And his quest seems a little boring. But it’ll work for an example.

The problem is, Sir Coughalot is a knight, and we all know knights slay dragons every day. Also, he probably has a squire and bunch of friends with swords and shields. So we lay down the book with a yawn and say, “Ho hum. Maybe there’s something good on TV.” That is an author’s nightmare. I can’t have you laying down my book to run off and see who makes it to the next round of American Idol. Even if the cute kid with the weird hair sings just like Freddie Mercury.

In order to keep you hooked, I need to raise the stakes a little. I need to pull you into my web of fiction. (Wow. That sounded kind of cool. We need an author superhero who catches guys in his web of fiction. “Stand back, evil nemesis. I have a historical romance and I know how to use it.”)

Anyway, back to raising the stakes. One of the easiest ways to make you care about my character is by taking away his or her supports. In our story about Sir Coughalot, I need to get him away from his co-knights, and maybe even his squire. Isolation is used a ton, but there is a reason so many fantasy novels start with an orphaned child. What is more vulnerable than a baby left on a doorstep? Of course it works even better if the baby is left on the doorstep of a family that is mean to him and makes him sleep under the stairs while his mean older cousin gets two rooms to himself.

There are books which do not use this tool. For example, my friend James Dashner has a novel called The 13th Reality in which the boy goes on his adventure with his father. But even then, James uses the tool of isolation. He makes sure the dad is more like a big kid. Dad does not step in and save the day at every turn. So what we really have is more like a sidekick than a true parent figure. In Lord of the Rings, Samwise stays with Frodo, but the rest of the fellowship cannot come. It’s handled very skillfully, but in truth it’s just a tool to further isolate the protagonist. (Of course, the first isolation is when Gandalf leaves.)

Okay, so in our story, we could have everyone else be afraid of the dragon. But that’s pretty cliché (like the rest of the story isn’t, right?), so instead let’s say that the cup is rumored to turn anyone who sees it into a stick of gum. That should scare away all the other knights. The squire stays on, but he’s never been all that bright. And besides, he likes gum. We have now used isolation to up the ante.

Our next tool is disorientation. Let’s go back to our hypothetical misfit living under the stairs with a mean family and a bully cousin. His life is pretty miserable, and he certainly doesn’t have any friends, but at least he is used to it. In order to really create some interest on the part of the reader, we need to raise the stakes again. We need our readers to not only like our protagonist, but to actually begin the process of putting themselves in his place. A cool way to do that is to put the protagonist into a world he is unfamiliar with. And so much the better if the reader is unfamiliar with the world as well.

I write fantasy novels, but let me point out that when I say world, I am not specifically referring to another planet. It could be the world of high finance. It could be the country mouse going to the city. It could be that 99.9% of everyone on Earth dies. All a new “world” requires is that the protagonist finds herself in a place that throws her off balance. This is why Harry Potter goes to Hogwarts. It’s why Frodo leaves the Shire. It’s why Prince Raoden is thrown into Elantris. It’s why Luke Skywalker ends up in a swamp with a little green Muppet.

Let me use another example from a movie my younger readers may not be as familiar with. In the movie Jaws, the protagonist must stop a great white shark from munching its way through an entire town of tourists. We isolate him by turning the townspeople against him. Then we disorient him but making him afraid of what? Water, of course! Then we put him out on a boat with a crazy captain.

The other great thing about putting our protagonist into a new world is that we, the readers, get to discover the world right along with him, wondering over the flying brooms and laughing at the missing stair riser. Of course when they get to their new world, they might start making friends again, lessening the isolation. But there are plenty of ways to turn the people in the new world against them as well, right? So let’s send our knight to a land where dragons live in peaceful villages and knights are the ones that attack and terrify. And just for fun, let’s make the dragons people-size and the bad knights huge, terrifying creatures. That puts our little knight right in the thick of it.

Last but not least is misdirection. Going back to Harry—I mean, our hypothetical misfit—how do we make sure the reader doesn’t guess who Voldemort is? This is a slight problem because the obvious choice would be the new teacher, right? Okay, so we need the reader to completely discount Professor Quirrell. How do we pull it off? Misdirection. Get the reader to make an assumption which will keep them looking the wrong way.

In this case, JK Rowling introduces Professor Quirrell early in the story as a nervous little man who is overcome with wonder at meeting the great Harry Potter. This does two things. First, it makes the reader create a mental image of Quirrell as someone so non-threatening we can’t even consider him as a suspect. Second, she makes the introduction just as we are entering the world of magic. She distracts us with all the cool other things so we don’t have time to consider why she took all that time to introduce a character of such little importance so completely.

Of course the second part of misdirection is giving the reader an alternate target to focus on. If only JK Rowling could have come up with a slimy, mean, back-stabbing type of character who skulks around the school. Someone who surely has it in for Harry. Oh wait. She did! Snape was the target she wanted us to focus on while Quirrell worked quietly in the background. Of course it turns out that Snape was even more misdirection for future novels.

To wrap up our story of Sir Coughalot, we could have the squire actually be a bad guy all along. He could be just waiting for his chance to turn our poor knight into a package of Hubba Bubba and steal the cup for himself.

So there you have it. Isolation, disorientation, and misdirection. Fun tools. Powerful tools. But use them carefully. You wouldn’t want to put an eye out.

J. Scott Savage is the author of five novels, including his most recent, Farworld, the first in a fantasy series for young readers. Visit him at www.readfarworld.com

We have asked published authors if they would be willing to write about their experiences as a writer and what led them into a writing career.  The response has been very overwhelming and we will shortly begin adding their posts to our blog.

If you are a published writer feel free to submit your url in the comments of this post and we may contact you asking you to be a guest blogger as well.

steve