Critique Ground Rules

In offering: One perfect white rose from the bush in the front garden:

Critique situations have the potential to be fraught with emotional mines. You can make it harder on yourself or you can make it easier.

Hard: just join a group of people you don't know and who don't read the genre you write.
Easier: It helps to at least be familiar with your proposed critique partners. Not everyone has to write the same genre and subgenre, but if you write scifi or erotica, it sure helps to dodge groups full of people allergic to those genres. You'll be happier if you're reading stories you generally like to read and you'll be far more confident of the critiques you'll receive if the people reading you understand the conventions of your genre.

Hard: Mixing beginning writers with very seasoned writers. Not saying this to be a snob. This is about offering critique at a level someone can fully comprehend and *action*. My example: my first few RWA conferences, I had the option to attend Margie Lawson workshops. Went to one and left halfway through because it was so far ahead of where I was as a writer, I couldn't understand what was being presented. Now, after a few books under my belt and a critical eye toward how I put emotion on the page, I can and do grasp the concepts I once couldn't. Further, I can apply the teaching and see the immediate change in my craft. Mixing wildly different skill levels makes life hard for everyone.
Easier: Finding a group of writers who are about at the same level as you are - some are farther along the road and they'll pull you along. A few will be a little way back on the road and you'll help pull them along. It creates synergy.

Once you've found your group, you have to learn how to both accept and offer critique with grace and with humor. These are some hard won ground rules I'm about to lay on you. We won't talk about how I worked them out other than to say it wasn't pretty.

• Leave your defensiveness at the door. Learn to listen with your mouth closed whether you agree or disagree with someone's critique (until it's your turn to talk.)
• Assume the best intentions./Come with the best intentions. If anyone in the group hasn't come to help make books better, you have a problem. Don't be that problem.
  
• Address the writing and only the writing. Zero personal attacks.
• The words 'that's dumb' or 'that's stupid' may never leave your mouth in reference to another person's writing.
• Ask questions. Rather than saying 'you have no point to this scene', ask 'what do you want the point of this scene to be'? This helps if the other writer is getting a little tense in the face of critique. It asks them to think which moves them out of emotion.
  
• Suggest possible fixes for any issues you identify. I'm a stickler for this one - if I can't make a suggestion for something that bothers me, I'll mark the section in text and talk through why I'm bothered and then ask for input from the rest of the group for ideas on how to fix because I care enough about my crit partners that I don't want anyone left hanging.
  
• Offer ideas and suggestions without ego. You're offering up ideas and suggestions, yes, but release any attachment to having someone use them. Your goal is to spark the other person's imagination, not get your way. If you feel really strongly about an idea, use it yourself. Let everyone else decide what's right for their stories.
  
• What happens in critique, stays in critique. Your critique group needs to be a safe space to try new things, make mistakes, learn new technique, and air intellectual property that isn't ready for public consumption. Trust matters for and from all members.
• Share the wealth of knowledge. Recommend classes that helped you. Share notes where it's ethically legit to do so. Remember a rising tide lifts all boats.
  

Critique is hard. There's a lot of emotion involved. Learning to navigate your own and everyone else's is no small task. Give yourself and one another grace. I've learned to couch suggestions in terms of opportunity. Ask anyone who's ever been critiqued by me about my favorite phrase: "I feel like you have an opportunity here to <insert plot point, emotional hit, etc>". It's served me well because it offers a writer choice without intimating that they've done something wrong in their book. I may feel that they *have* done something wrong, but I'm sure not going to say that. Maybe that's the last rule: Care about other people's feelings and remember that WIPs are fragile little birds. Gentle, honest handling strengthens them so that when they are released into the world, they're ready to fly.

Three Things to Never Do as a Critique Partner

 I'm engaged in a project this year to promote my backlist more. (*cough* AT ALL *cough*) So today I'm featuring EXACT WARM UNHOLY. This story originally appeared in THE DEVIL'S DOORBELL anthology and it's one of my favorites. I adored writing this troubled, but super smart heroine. So much smexy in this one.

Tonight my name is Mary…

Or is it? Sometimes she’s Tiffany or Syd or Bobbi. But whatever face she wears, she returns to the same bar, to find a new man and seduce him, safe in the knowledge that no one will recognize her. Until one man does.

“And I was ... Stunned by the originality of the concept of this story. Stunned by the emotions it made me experience in such a short expanse of time. Stunned by the beauty of the romance in it that ran parallel to the overwhelming sadness throughout. I mean, seriously. If you don’t fall in love with Peter, you have a heart of stone.”

~ Kristen Ashley on Goodreads

      

This week at the SFF Seven, we're giving tips on How to Become a Better Beta Reader or Critique Partner. As with many skills, this is one that is acquired over time, through extensive practice and lots of trial and error. In fact, learning to become a better reader for others, with useful feedback to give, is largely a case of figuring out what NOT to do. So that's what I'm offering today.

1. Don't tell the other writer how to change their work. Focus on what isn't working for you and, if you can, do your best to articulate why it's not working. But resist the temptation to suggest rewrites or any kind of specific plan. Those kinds of feedback move it into the realm of how you would write it, not them.
2. Don't get emotionally involved. So you hate the protagonist? Maybe you hate the premise? Doesn't matter. Separate your personal reactions from legitimate reader ones. If you can't step away from your personal buttons being pushed, then recuse yourself from reading.
3. Don't argue with the writer. It's their work. They get the final say. Give them your honest feedback and let it go. 

Who to Trust With Your Work - The Junior High Dance Edition

How do you know who to trust with your writing, especially early drafts and idea bouncing.

Yikes. This is such a process of trial and error. It's like those middle school and junior high dances where everyone's awkwardly hugging the edges of the room afraid to ask anyone to dance for fear of rejection or ridicule. Figuring out who you can trust with your well being as well as your heart is part of growing up as a human being. Figuring out who to trust with your writing is part of growing as a writer. And yes. The process is about as painful.

There's so much to learn.What's acceptable behavior. What isn't. What builds you up. What tears you down. That last is really hard because what's soul-killing to one writer will be nourishing for another. I will say this, though. When you find someone you can trust to give you the unvarnished truth about your work in a kind, constructive way, that person will be worth their weight in gold. It took me three dysfunctional groups before I fell by accident into one that taught me not only how to critique, it taught me how to take critique. The authors who welcomed me into that group had hundreds (not kidding) of books pubbed between them. I had zero, and I was still several years away from selling anything. These ladies ripped my manuscript to shreds. It would have been demoralizing except for the fact that they also painstakingly explained what was wrong and how I could fix it. Fantastic learning experience. Still, I could see where it might have been crushing had it come any earlier in my development.

I'll own up to mistakes made along the way, too. There were groups I joined simply because I could. They weren't a good match. Like trying to figure out dating, there's just no way to get out of it without hurting someone else or being hurt yourself. It's part of learning who your matches are. All you can do is try. And then try again. I'm lucky. Persistence paid off in spades. I have so many great critique and beta reading options - people writing and reading in my genre who know the market I'm writing for. Not a one of them is afraid to pull a punch because I'm tougher now. As my confidence has grown and as my trust in my crit readers has likewise grown, I want the bandages ripped off my story wounds. No candy coating. I know these people have my back and want my story to be the best it can be. So I want to get on with making my story better.

It took years to get here. It took some tears. I wish there was a formula for instantly detecting trustworthiness I could offer you. But I'm afraid this is all one grand experiment. Pretty much like the rest of life.

Who Do You Trust with Your Work?

This week at the SFF Seven, we're asking: how do you know who to trust with your writing, especially early drafts and idea bouncing.

This is similar to a question I get all the time, which is how to pick critique partners and how many I use, including beta readers, etc.

The short answer is that this has changed quite a bit over the course of my career. I've been a member of two different critique groups that met IRL, and I've been part of various clusters of critique partners and beta readers online.

Another short answer is that who I discuss my ideas with or share work with at various stages changes all the time, and varies depending on the type of story and what I need help with. I'm blessed with a number of writer friends at this point who can read for me, and give me what I need, usually blazingly fast, too.

I can also say that I've grown extraordinarily picky about who I bounce ideas with and who I ask to look at early drafts. This is because - and I've used this analogy before - stories in their earliest stages are like infants. Their skulls are still soft and they are fragile beings that must be carefully tended. Just as you'd never hand your newborn child to just any person on the street, you don't want just anyone giving your fragile new idea a good, hard shake.

There is a time and necessary function to the good, hard shake - but that's akin to the college years, when you figure they've got to get drunk and pass out on the couch at the fraternity house at least once and learn some lessons from it.

But not the baby story. The baby story needs love and nurturing. It needs someone who can see the potential and not that dreadfully bulging forehead. I even left one IRL critique group because I felt they were having a negative impact on my work, instead of a positive one.

That's not the topic question, though, right? The question is how do you know who to trust?

There are no easy or short answers to that one, though I'm very much looking forward to hearing what advice my fellow SFFers have to offer. It took me a long time to decide to leave the crit group that wasn't working for me. It can be difficult to separate the very real reaction most humans have to criticism from the intuition that something is having a very real negative impact.

None of us like to have our work criticized, even if we are privately pissed that they passed out on the fraternity house couch. Learning to receive criticism and use it effectively is a huge part of learning to be a professional author.

But not all criticism is useful, and it's not always kindly meant.

So, that's how I decide: I consider the source and their intentions. If feedback from someone feels negative or unkindly meant, I pay attention to where they are with their own work. Are they feeling good about the work they're doing? How do they critique other people's work? Are they otherwise supportive of me and seem genuinely pleased for my successes?

That last question is key, and helped me to decide to leave that group. When I mentioned a success, these same people were sour and unsupportive. I knew then that their criticism of my writing felt negative because it was.

When you figure that out, walk away. Don't trust them with anything fragile again.

Do You Need a Critique Group - Or Something ELSE?

Yesterday I cooked brunch for writer friends Jim Sorenson and Sage Walker. (That's me in my Orchid Throne apron that the amazingly talented Minerva Spencer made for me. Isn't it awesome??)

We sat in the grape arbor, listened to the bluebirds feed their nestlings, and talked all things writing. Sage and Jim are in the Santa Fe crit group I used to attend. I stopped going last fall because... It just didn't feel worth my time. In fact, it sometimes felt counter-productive as a few of the guys in the group always took pains to mention that they weren't my readers. Fair enough - but then how is their critique useful to me? I stuck with it for quite a while (two years or so), because I thought it MIGHT be useful to me, to get feedback from different quarters. When I was first asked to join, several of my friends gave me the head tilt and said, "But do you need a critique group?"

I thought maybe I did, but it turns out I mostly wanted to talk about writing with other writers.

I liked that aspect, I really did! And I believe in critique. I've been in other critique groups and I've had many critique partners over the years. I cannot emphasize how much those relationships have helped me to develop my craft. (I touched on this in my blog post the other day Silly Writer! Reviews Aren’t for Craft.) But one key skill in being a career author is learning what critique to listen to and what to discard. It's not always easy to get past the emotional flinch at someone criticizing your work - so you have to learn to look past emotion and rationally evaluate the feedback - but you also have to be aware of when that feedback is actually damaging.

For me, I noticed that I came away from the critique sessions feeling bad about my work. Not from everyone. Some in the group found flaws and problems, but that feedback had me fired up to fix it. A few other people... well, I just felt bruised. The big test was when I, weeks later, pulled out some written notes they'd made, and the negative impact just slammed into me.

Ouch. And this was on a draft of The Orchid Throne, which St. Martin's liked enough to buy for decent money.

I mention these specifics to add helpful details, because I know it can be really difficult to parse the flinch from the injury. I'm not casting blame at all, because sometimes that's just how it goes. Not everyone who gives you critique is the right person to do it. (Sometimes jealousy factors in and people are mean for no more reason than that, but usually they mean well and are simply not a good fit for your thing.)

What I've found at this point in my writing career is that I really like - and sometimes need - to talk through story stuff, but not necessarily the full critique drill. With Sage and Jim yesterday, we talked about this world I'm building in this New Shiny book/series. They're both super smart about SF and we argued some of the finer points of how this world would work. That was awesome! I liked that they got me to defend my choices, and they suggested a great solution to a conundrum. It was super helpful and fun. Sage has also sent me some thoughts on what I've written so far. I also asked Marcella Burnard - our Friday poster on the SFF Seven - to take a gander at my opening chapters. She had no context or previous exposure coming into the story, so she was able to give me useful thoughts on what information she needed.

So, all of this is by way of saying that there's lots of ways to get feedback from other authors on our work - and also to give it. Knowing what will be helpful to another author whose work you're reading is a skill worth building, too. (And, to touch back on the reviews thing, that is NOT something a reviewer needs to know how to do. They need to know how to give useful information about a book to other readers, so they can decided if the book might be for them.)

What's most important is to do what's right for the work.

Does Your Family Read Your Books?

We have high winds today and Jackson is feeling the fever - here he is trying to climb the portal post. Spoiler alert: that's as high as he got.

Our topic this week is whether our spouses or close family read our books. I always find it interesting how widely this answer varies among writers - from those who cowrite with spouses, or rely upon them or close family to critique, to those whose families don't even know they write.

Seriously - I have a friend who was a journalist and wrote - and shopped - his first novel in secret, even from his wife and kids, because he didn't want them to know about it if he failed. Which... I can understand. It's an excruciating phase, the one where writers labor for years to hone their craft, often over multiple novels or hundreds of stories, with nothing to demonstrate to the greater world for the effort. A lot of writers give up in this phase, or self-publish in order to have "something" to show for all that work. There are few questions more invidious than "Oh, you're *still* writing that book?"

At the other end are the couples where both are writers and exchange work, or who collaborate together. I think collaborating with a spouse would be trying, although the team writing as Ilona Andrews does it brilliantly. I'm still amused by Ilona's explanation that they don't really fight over the storylines, but one of them might "angrily load the dishwasher."

As for me, my husband David does not read what I write, pretty much ever. Sometimes he hears pieces of stories at readings. But, overall, he doesn't read fiction. I'm okay with this. I think our close families can exert strong influence on us, and not always in the way that encourages to grow.

I taught Tai Chi for a lot of years, including an introductory class in continuing education, and it was always a bad sign when spouses took the class together. Or parent and child. Or sisters. (I don't recall ever having brothers take a class together.) Inevitably, they would start telling the other how to do it. Usually it was framed as being "helpful," but it rarely was. It got so that in partner exercises we'd make it a rule that they couldn't work with someone they knew. This was entirely to pry apart the people who knew each other far too well - and got in each other's way.

So, I don't mind that David doesn't read my work. It gives me a certain freedom to have that headspace to myself. My mom reads my books, but only after they're published. Some other members of my family read them, but largely most of them don't. I'm okay with that, too. Everyone should read what they want to!

Returning the Favor: Helping Fellow Writers

It's cherry blossom time in Poulsbo, the Little Norway of Washington state. The left hand shot is of the first blossom that's popped on the weeping cherry tree that Hatshepsut is inspecting (right hand photo). When the blooms finally all open, the tree will be a mass of pink. I'll try for another photo at that point. It's pretty spectacular in bloom. May even have to break out a real camera for that.

You'd think that my cherry blossom obsession had nothing to do with the topic of mentoring or giving back to the writerly orgs to which most of us inevitably belong. You'd think incorrectly because I can make anything about anything. It's a gift. Brace yourself for a crappy analogy:

When it comes to mentoring, I feel like I'm bringing a cell phone camera to an opportunity that calls for a massive DSLR

Yeah. That was it. My analogy. Aren't you glad you stuck around for that? What I'm saying is that while I try to do my darnedest to contribute, I want to be ultra careful about holding myself up as any kind of authority on anything writing. My knowledge and skill set are still equal to a middle of the road cell phone camera. There are loads of writers out there in the world with the amassed ability that's equal to a super hi-res Digital SLR camera. Sure, sure. I've held offices for various organizations. I've judged contests and critiqued entries as kindly and as constructively as possible. I will volunteer during conferences for any and all tasks that will help things go more smoothly. Need bags stuffed? Count me in. Files sorted and organized? Sure. Boxes carted? I'm there.

But frankly, at this point, I am more in need of mentoring than I am in need of mentoring others. I still have so much to learn and so many opportunities to breathe some new life into a career that's been in a bit of a holding pattern. Maybe when I manage that, I'll have a great story to tell other writers about how to do it - or at least the story of how it worked for me.

Sure, I've taught workshops. I've taken far more. Mainly, I think, because while I get a lot out of workshops, I find offering workshops to be too impersonal. My great joy is sitting down in a group of writers and listening to everyone's work. This happened recently. A writer with a great manuscript came to critique. We read her opening chapter. Everyone gave feedback, then I said, "You know, based on this chapter we've read, here's the story you're setting up." She stared at me. "That's not the story at all." "Yeah," I said. "I think you started the book in the wrong place. From what you're describing about the plot, your story starts here." I was trembling in my boots, because WHO WANTS TO HEAR THAT???

Her eyes were wide. She sucked in a breath and then shouted, "Oh my GOD! I knew something was wrong and I had no idea what it was! Thank you!" 

So that's my sweet spot. Getting to offer up an opinion about how a story is off track and offering options for putting it back up on rails. It isn't massive value to massive numbers of writers - but if it helps one single writer get her work to market, I'll be happy. Actually. Scratch that. I already am happy. It's alarmingly satisfying to identify story issues (in someone else's work where I'm not blinded by trees and forest) and to come up with potential resolutions. It's giving someone a leg up in their work. It's also excellent practice for me - solving other people's story issues makes it more likely I'll be able to ID my own. Maybe.

What I really want to know is if you could get any workshop from any writer(s) what would it be about?