Critiquing A Story You Don’t Like

In writing groups there seem to be two schools of thought on this issue:

1. Since critiquing is good for the critiquer, and since any critique is better than no critique (for the writer of a piece), all members of a writing group should offer opinion on anything served by another.

2. There are some genres, storylines and themes that an individual could never like, no matter how well done, and asking that individual to like a work in progress is a hopeless exercise, because a critique from this person can have nothing of value to offer the writer.

Ecology offers some useful terminology to describe such relationships:

MUTUALISTS — organisms which both benefit from and benefit us

COMMENSALS — benefit from us but don’t otherwise affect us

PATHOGENS — benefit from us at our expense

Naturally, we’re aiming for a mutualist arrangement in our writing groups, or commensal at the least. But when someone is critiquing our work, despite the fact  they know they don’t like the genre, or can’t be doing with foul language, or don’t abide religious stories… or whatever… sometimes we need to ask what benefit they are taking by offering their heavy criticism. Perhaps they are critiquing to an audience; perhaps they are finding catharsis in complaint; perhaps they use critique as a way to wind down after a bad day.

I used to belong to the first school of thought — critique everything — but am now more inclined to go for the second. I’ve simply not received useful critique from people who did not like the sort of thing I write.

There is a caveat, however:

Providing the reader is engaged (ie. that their eyes haven’t entirely glazed over) there are still some surface-level comments which can be offered by a critiquer who doesn’t like the genre/plot/theme in question:

1. line edits (spelling, punctuation, formatting errors)

2. contradictions

3. repetitions

4. errors of logic

5. factual errors

and anything else of that nature.

That’s why I think that if you’re critiquing a genre that you have never really liked in the past, it pays to say so. As a disclaimer, not as part of a larger rant.

Related: Mark Twain On Assembling A Critique Group

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Whose advice to listen to?

from Mark Twain

Related Link: Some advice on advice.

The Need To Be Read

I like to play blackjack. I’m not addicted to gambling, I’m addicted to sitting in a semi-circle.
- Mitch Hedberg

This is what I do when I decide to write.

• I make myself sit down. (The hardest bit.)
• Once the computer is on I check emails – all of them – open Twitter, check Facebook, close Twitter. (The second hardest bit.)
• Open a new document in Word
• Stare at it.
• Eventually, at some point, I decide I’ll have to start, even if it stinks.
• If I’m really, really lucky, three hours later I’m still there. I haven’t noticed I’m hungry and I need to pee, but there it is: the first draft of a story.
• I want someone else to read it
• so I upload it to a writing site and inflict it upon others.

Why do I do this? Why not wait 24 hours or a week or 6 months, in which case I can tell, without anyone else’s opinion, exactly what’s wrong with it?

I sometimes ask for responses to my writing earlier than I should.

Why?

Until someone else reads it, the story may as well have stayed inside my head, where the fictional world exists at its most pure. There’s a part of me which thinks: If I’ve gone to the effort of extracting it, like teeth, from my head onto the page, I want someone else to experience it in some way, even if they hate it. (A story is never as good as it is in my head. Sometimes it’s way off.)

Stephen King makes a distinction between writing with the door closed (in which case the writer isn’t allowed to self-censor) and writing with the door open (for revisions, in which case the writer considers the response of others).

Is it possible to open the door too early?

I think so. It’s worth acknowledging the Need To Be Read – if you recognise it, that is – and know that your first draft exists whether someone else has read it or not.

And it will continue to exist, six months later. (Unless your harddrive fails, and you forgot to back it up, which sux.)

WHEN TO UPLOAD WRITING FOR PEER REVIEW?

I don’t have the answer to this, but here are a few thoughts:

1. Make sure you know what it is you want to achieve before asking for opinions.

(I might say, ‘Make sure you have a vision’, but that sounds a bit bullshitty.) In my own case, I have to finish a first draft before I know what my ‘vision’ is, so it’s a big mistake to offer the beginning of something up for critique before I’ve finished the first draft. You’ll get all sorts of opinions from a writing group – some people will get it, and some people will not. You have to ignore those who don’t ‘get it’.

But unless the writer ‘gets it’ herself, it’s easy to be confused by conflicting opinions – which are inevitable and healthy, by the way.

Other writers manage to have a clear vision for their work even before they’ve started writing it, and if that’s you then it may well work to upload bits of your writing as you go. It doesn’t work for me.

Know which kind of writer you are.

2. People join critique groups for all sorts of reasons, and in every group there is at least someone who is there mainly to have a (small but satisfying) audience.

They are there to be read.

Not everyone wants to be published. Some writers enjoy the process of writing, and for them, the process of writing ends at peer review, not at submitting.

If that’s you, you need to be careful about which writing group you join, because people who are hoping to get published may seem unnecessarily brutal.

In turn, those who aim at publication get frustrated with critters who fill their critique wordcount with back-patting and personal stories and social niceties in lieu of a solid, honest (and sometimes harsh) critique.

I personally don’t think that online writing forums are the way to go if you would like to have your work read by a small group of others. Online writing groups attract all sorts, and if you crave a bit of pleasantry, avoid cyber-groups like the plague.

If I wanted a social writing group I might join one of those night classes where people drink tea and eat jam scones. That sounds lovely. You don’t get that online.

3. Some writers share first first drafts, the ones that haven’t been copy-edited at all. If this is you, the comments you get from critters are likely to revolve around copy-editing issues. Readers are distracted by basic spelling errors, and it’s also an easy critique to offer, as it’s not necessary to think very deeply before correcting someone’s spelling, apostrophes and comma usage.

I don’t expect anything to be free of errors, but I prefer to get my own first draft as error-free as I can before showing it to others.

• It’s a courtesy to the critter. It’s hard to read something that’s full of spelling errors, especially on the screen.
• If a critter spends half an hour fixing my spelling, they’re unlikely to offer anything I do want, like comments on characterisation, emotional response and plot holes. They’ll be sick of it already.
• A good critter may not take me seriously as a writer.

If you, too, have this Need To Be Read, have a clear vision for your work, be choosy about your critique group, and give your work a once-over before asking the opinions of others. It just works better like that.

Related Link: The Joys and Dangers of Readership

The Head-Hopping Chestnut

One thing I’ve noticed about writing groups is the tendency to search for head-hopping, and some search for violations of point-of-view as voraciously as they hunt down spelling errors and inconsistent syntax.

pic by lapolab

There’s nothing wrong with this kind of critique – fussy ones, I mean. Genuine cases of head-hopping need to be fixed in a later draft. But I think the criticism of ‘head-hopping’ is regularly misapplied.

Consider the following passage, from Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates). April and Frank Wheeler have just decided to go to France. This is a description of the new household. We start in Frank Wheeler’s head:

…sometimes late at night when his throat had gone sore and his eyes hot from talking, when he hunched his shoulders and set his jaw and pulled his necktie loose and let it hang like a rope, [1] he could glare at the window and see the brave beginnings of a personage.

[2] It was a strange time for the children, too. [3] What exactly did going to France in the fall mean? And why did their mother keep insisting it was going to be fun, as if daring them to doubt it? For that matter, why was she so funny about a lot of things. [4] In the afternoons she would hug them and ask them questions in a rush of ebullience that suggested Christmas Eve, and then a minute later she’d be saying “Yes darling, but don’t talk quite so much, okay? Give Mommy a break.”

[5] Nor did their father’s homecoming do much to help: He might throw them high in the air and give them airplane rides around the house until they were dizzy, but only after having failed to see them altogether during the disturbingly long time it took him to greet their mother at the kitchen door. And the talking at dinner: It was hopeless for either child to try and get a word in edgewise. [6] Michael found he could jiggle in his chair, repeat baby words over and over in a shrill idiot’s monotone or stuff his mouth with mashed potato and hang his jaws open, all without any adult reproof; Jennifer would sit very straight at the table and refuse to look at him, feigning great interest in whatever her parents were saying, though afterwards, waiting for bedtime, she would sometimes go off quietly by herself and suck her thumb.

[1] Yates’ novel is about Frank – the narration is told through Frank Wheeler’s eyes – but if you’ve seen the movie you’ll know that Sam Mendes decided to give quite a bit more air-time to the character of April. If we imagine the novel, too, as a series of camera shots, Richard Yates sometimes moves his ‘camera’ outside Frank’s head, higher in the ceiling, looking down upon a scene to capture it in a new light. At [1]  we are definitely in Frank’s head.

[2] marks the shift from close third-person to true omniscient narration. Yates is about to explore this familial experience as it was for the children. But are we actually inside their heads? No, I don’t think so. To move inside their heads, telling the story from the children’s point of view would be a true case of head-hopping. Instead, Yates simply pans out, to a scene which includes the children as well as Frank.

[3] This question is very definitely inside the children’s heads. Or is it? Is this what Frank imagines his children to be thinking? Is this what the young Frank would have thought himself, if he were in his own children’s shoes?

[4] Here we touch upon a small injustice: Even though April involves her children in her own excitement, she doesn’t want to hear them get excited. I’m sure the children would have felt this injustice – children always do – but would they have been able to articulate it? This observation – picked because of its irony – is either the observation of Frank, looking on from afar, or of an omniscient narrator.

[5] Again, even though Frank is here referred to as ‘their father’, this observation could well come from Frank himself, in the kind of hindsight that follows much reflection. Are we to take as a given that novels written in the past tense are the product of much reflection and insight, whether that be from the character or some unnamed narrator? It think this is the main benefit of writing in past-tense (as opposed to present tense), or rather, that is one limit of writing in present-tense; that the narrator does not have the benefit of hindsight, so opportunities for philosophical musing are lost.

[6] Now we are ostensibly inside Michael’s head, but this is really the observation of Frank himself (in hindsight) or of the omniscient narrator.

Yates’ scene may, upon critical inspection, seem to break the Rules of POV, but no one could sanely argue he didn’t know exactly what he was doing. The reader glides smoothly from one character to another. This adds variety to the narrative method and insight into the Wheeler’s family life. Switching from close third-person to omniscient narration is not easy to get right, but if writers timidly avoid it, these advantages are lost.

Take-home points:

• When a writer pans out in order to convey a wider scene, this is not a case of head-hopping. It is a widely used technique.
• Deviation into the heads of minor characters is not always head-hopping. The writer may be making deliberate use of temporary omniscient narration. Perhaps we are still inside the narrator’s head, witnessing a scene in its entirely with the benefit of hindsight, even though it doesn’t seem like this at line-level (as in the dip into Michael’s head, above)
• The rules of head-hopping are actually more pliable than many writing guides suggest. We should be wary of pouncing upon head-hopping in other writers’ drafts – as well as when editing our own – because there is really only one question to ask: Does it work?

Here is another point of view. And months later, here is another blog post saying pretty much the same thing, except with more comments than this blog will ever get. The comments are interesting.

Related Links: Have you heard the chestnut about was? (By Emma Darwin), and why Yates’ books have been voted the most depressing, ever. Is Head-hopping A Myth? from The Write Practice

Holding Out On The Reader

Here’s my problem with mystery/detective novels.

So, you’ve authored a mystery. You’ve created a narrator to tell me your story, one little bit at a time. You knew, when you started editing this book, how it was going to end. You know whodunnit. So spit it out already!

So you see, I’m not a big fan of mystery novels. I’m sure the best examples of the genre are truly excellent. If I could only let go of my Type-A Personality, sit back and enjoy the ride. Instead, I get fed up with the drip-feeding.

(I’m not the only one who overthinks this issue.)

As a reader I have little time for red-herrings, and I can even reinterpret foreshadowing as telegraphing once I’ve reached the end of the story. I don’t enjoy feeling like a pawn. (Yes, we’re all pawns. I just don’t like feeling like one.)

All this moaning is neither here nor there, because I’m not a part of the mystery/detective literary world. But is there a take-home message for writers of other genres? Should this bizarre response teach me something else, as a some-time writer of short stories?

I think so. Because there are a number of ways in which writers can unwittingly ‘hold out’ on readers. I’m as guilty as the next hack.

1. WITHHOLDING CHARACTER NAMES

(spoofing now)

Chapter One

He heard his heart pound in his chest. Or so he thought. Perhaps this wasn’t his own heart after all. Perhaps he heard footsteps, approaching down the shingle path as he lurked in the shadows of the eaves. Yes. He was sure now. He could definitely hear footsteps, heavy and deliberate.

Each instance of ‘he’ could have been an opportunity for the author to GO AHEAD AND TELL US the protagonist’s name. But for some reason the author refuses to offer a name, even though this is third-person narrative – possibly omniscient, though we can’t yet tell. Name is withheld even though a third-person narrator has FULL ACCESS to all names. There seems no good reason why the author shouldn’t just go ahead and tell us the character’s name is Bob, and here’s Bob, lurking in the shadows. Hi Bob. Let’s get on with the story.

Why do so many authors do this? To create suspense, I guess. But there’s good suspense and bad suspense.

When meeting in real life – across cultures – a few nuggets of information are exchanged before progressing further with a conversation. One of these things is the other person’s name*. Even when we know nothing else about a person, we feel more at ease just knowing names. That’s why check-out chicks are made to wear name-badges (even if the name is obviously faked. I know. I used to be a check-out chick and we often swapped badges for fun.)

Have you ever met a new person at a social gathering, been introduced, instantly forgotten their name then found yourself unexpectedly caught up in deep conversation for the rest of the night? After a while it dawns on you: You know all sorts of things about this lovely new acquaintance – their job, where they live, where they went to school, their favourite sandwich spread. If only you could remember their name. Eventually, one of you must own up to the uncomfortable: ‘Er, sorry. I actually missed your name…’ It’s been bugging you, hasn’t it?

Fiction is the same. Many readers want to know the name of a character before knowing much more. The name serves as a hanger for all other information. And when an author refuses to let on, it feels like holding-out.

2. WITHHOLDING SETTING

I am very guilty of this and I explain why in this post.

3. WITHHOLDING BACKSTORY

As my chef-trained friend once mused, ‘People are scared of chicken.’ This was after I opened the fridge, expressing doubt at last night’s leftovers. The public are imbued with so many horror stories of food poisoning – especially here in Australia, and especially over the summer BBQ season – that it’s easy to shun all shreds of leftover chicken no matter how promptly you transferred it to the fridge after yesterday’s do.

I took this pic at the Canberra Chicken Olympics

Same goes for writers and backstory, I think. We’re constantly warned off the dreaded info-dump. The first big lesson I learned from my writing group was Drip-feed your backstory. My first attempt at a novel (I’ve since attempted two more and finished none of them) had far too much backstory in it, and chapter two was entirely backstory. Classic mistake.

After my lightbulb moment, I couldn’t believe I’d been so naive.

Step Two of the learning curve: Avoid backstory altogether.

This is equally misguided. In an attempt to create something fast-paced and attention grabbing, I ended up writing a good number of stories which failed to tell readers anything about my characters, aside from what readers really had to know during that small amount of time between the beginning and end of the story. I may have achieved something poetic and minimalist at times. But those stories were not the least bit satisfying for most readers.

I still struggle to know how much backstory to include, and what constitutes ‘enough’. The line is so fine and I’m not a good judge of it in my own stories – I’m far better when looking at someone else’s draft. (Another big reason to join a writers’ group.)

In sum: Not all leftover chicken will kill you. Don’t be afraid of it just because of the horror stories. Learn the food-handling rules and you’ll be fine. Same goes with writing and backstory. Omission of interesting backstory can feel like holding-out on the reader, even if you end up slowing the pacing down for a scene or two.

*Another thing: I’ve noticed new acquaintances like to start out sure of each other’s marital status/orientation. Even though it’s nobody else’s business – most times – this is no doubt an evolutionary advantage. I once had a man declare in a pub, soon after meeting, that he was, ‘Not married, not single, not gay.’ As an unattached man in his 40s, I think he’d grown weary of this universal need-to-know, but I must say, he didn’t clear a single thing up for me that day. (Though, as my new boss, I worked him out as time went on.)

Condescending Punctuation?

Paraphrased below:

two typical writing-group bitch fights. These discussions crop up regularly in writing groups: different people, same-old, same-old.

pic by cutesmallfuzzy

You need to read Lynne Truss or something. You can’t punctuate for shit.

Lynne Truss? That cow who made heaps of money off something that’s not even new? Pfft. A whole book on apostrophes. Why waste your time reading that when you could be writing? Anyway, that book is for people who already understand punctuation. Anyone who understands Eats, Shoots and Leaves must understand punctuation. It’s not that I don’t understand, it’s just that it’s boring as shit. You’re boring me. Talk to the hand. La la la la la.

But when you don’t punctuate properly, as your reader, I’m tripped up. Every. Single. Time. Don’t you see? I shouldn’t even notice the punctuation if it’s done right.

Get over yourself. This is a draft. If this gets published, that’s what my copy-editors are for. I’m not asking you to be my copy editor. I’m asking you to comment on my story.

I can’t see your story unless you punctuate properly. It’s a COURTESY TO THE READER.

It’s an early draft! I’ll punctuate it when it’s finished. (Maybe.)

Doesn’t matter. If you want me to read it, you’ve got to put in the apostrophes.

*

What’s up with your punctuation? Where are your speech marks, for instance?

Ah, yes. I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy doesn’t use speech marks. In fact, you’ll be hard pressed to find a handful of commas in The Road. If McCarthy doesn’t use speech marks, we don’t have to either. He’s on the vanguard, man. Punctuation is so yesterday.

Yeah but no but, yeah but no but, that’s McCarthy for you. You and me, we’re not McCarthy. We can’t get away with that kind of hubris. And what about all this dropping the g’s off the end of words? What’s with that? Why don’t you just go ahead and spell your words properly. All this attempt at dialect, it’s tiring on the reader and, to be honest, your work is starting to sound like a pastiche.

Hubris? Did you say ‘hubris’? Are you saying I’m arrogant? Am I an arrogant, condescending git for leaving out speech-marks and dropping off the g’s?

If you like. That is a form of arrogance, yes, expecting readers to do extra work because you can’t be arsed with speech marks around direct dialogue.

On the contrary, I find OVER punctuation more of an arrogance. My readers are not idiots. They know from my line breaks that this is dialogue. Only a fool would think this sentence here wasn’t dialogue, with or without the speech marks. And what do you expect me to do about the g-dropping?

You can’t just drop off g’s.

Why not? Do you want me to put in an apostrophe, to let any damn-fool readers know that a g has been omitted? You think they don’t know?

Why not just spell words correctly? And punctuate according to established conventions?

You think unless I do everything by the book my readers won’t know what the hell I’m writing about? You think unless I put a foreign word in italics my reader won’t recognise it as foreign in origin? You think unless I put a comma before tag-questions my reader won’t know it’s a tag-question? Grrr. You say I’m arrogant, but look at you, you boring, condescending, pedantic shit.

Related Link: On Punctuation Gimmicks