Critters

Critter: (noun, dialect.) A reader who undertakes to provide a constructive critique or helpful feedback on behalf of the author of the piece being read.

Critters are great. Critters are indispensable to my writing process, and I suspect that 90% of successful writers have critters of some sort.

Where to find good critters can be a difficult problem. Non-writer friends are often not the best critters, because they don’t always understand what kind of detail is helpful to a writer. Writer friends can make good critters, but not when they’re busy with writing first drafts of their own.

Critter exchanges can be a very good arrangement, or writer’s circles in which the entire group acts as critters for each of the members in turn.

I’ve found some good critter exchanges on the ‘Nano swaps’ forum of the National Novel Writing Month online community, and I’m attend two local writer’s groups that do critiques of pieces that members bring in. I’ve even acted as a critter wrangler for the Stringing Words online forum, organizing their third CritMo (Critter Month) event and pairing up authors with volunteer critters who read their pieces and send in feedback.

Recently, I’ve also joined an amazing online workshop called… (drum roll please,) critters.org, which runs something like the same program on a much larger scale. Here’s how it works, basically:

Don’t fight the rule

I went back to the New writing workshop last night – I had a good time and got some good notes on the first three pages of “The Landing”, as well as listening to some funky poems and stories and telling the other writers what I thought about them.

It was definitely a different experience than the first time I went, in September. I came prepared for some ‘intensely constructive criticism’, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be. But there was something else that I was reacting too differently.

The workshop co-ordinator made a point of spelling out ‘his rule’ for these workshops – the author hands out the copies, gives a little explanation if he (or she) feels inclined to, reads… AND THEN SHUTS UP. The rest of the group are then free to respond in any way they feel moved, to get into a discussion among themselves, but they are not supposed to ask the author questions. And the author is not supposed to reply to their feedback, beyond the level of grunts or pleasantries perhaps.

I do remember something being said along these lines back in September, but not as clearly – and I definitely didn’t follow the rule back then. That was a lot of the problem, I see now – I started to get defensive about my story, which probably got some of the other participants more insistent on making their points.

This isn’t the only way to run a critiquing circle, of course. The Chester’s group has a format where the people who wrote the piece are welcome into the discussion, and questions are often asked of them, and that works quite well for the group there by and large. But the rule for the new workshop probably encourages more indepth criticism, as opposed to promoting encouragement of authors.

I’ll definitely be going back to James street north for the New Workshop again this winter. And – I’m sorry for arguing back last time, guys.

Blogosphere special: the “Show me yours” Blogfest!

Blogosphere index

Okay, today is the day of the Show me yours Blogfest, in which bloggers share a 500-word passage from their Nanowrimo 2010 writing and go comment like mad on each other’s excerpts!

So, here’s mine. It’s from the very beginning of “The Angel’s Charlie,” and does a really good job of setting the scene, I think:

Nothing made sense when Richard opened his eyes.

It wasn’t like things had been that clear in the moment before he opened them either, really. The last thing he could clearly remember was driving home after a late night in the office, and then… well, he’d still been sitting down, but somehow it had been obvious that he wasn’t in a car anymore. As far as he could tell now, he was in the chapel of a church, which hadn’t been the case for far too many months, really, and it definitely wasn’t Ottawa Street Baptist, either.

He started to explore the material available in the back of the pew in front of him. Old-fashioned looking hymnal, so probably not an evangelical denomination. Catholic? No, the decor didn’t really look Catholic… maybe Anglican. Aha, little visitor’s cards to drop into the collection plate, with spots for name and address. But they’d have the name on the card – yeah. ‘Episcopal church of the Good Shephard’, and an address on Delaware Street. It didn’t really ring a bell, except that he thought something was slightly off with ‘Episcopal.’

“I’m afraid that there won’t be a worship service for a while, young man. Are you in need of prayers?”

Richard looked up quickly to see an older man in a sedate uniform standing near the chapel doors. Quickly he rose to his own feet. “Not really, reverend… though a good word with the Lord Father is always appropriate, I suppose. Maybe we could pray together, before we leave, actually. But – but I have to say I’m a little confused, not sure how I got here.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you with that, my son, though I assumed you walked in,” the reverend said, chuckling slightly. “When I saw you sleeping in the pew on a Tuesday night, I suppose I assumed – that you just didn’t have any better shelter from the cold. Perhaps I was wrong.”

“Yes, the last thing I remember, I was on my way home… do you have any idea how I’d get to Queenston Road from here?” The reverend looked blank. “The Research in Motion headquarters?” Still no real recognition. “It’s not too far from the big university campus.”

“Ah, well, then, you’re just down the street from campus,” the reverend told him more brightly. “I can point you that way, at least. And you can check in our parking lot to see if your car is there, of course.”

“Thank you.” Richard took a breath. “What about that prayer, then?”

“I think that would be a good idea.” The two men sat down on one of the nearby pews. “I’m reverend Hynes, by the way.”

“Richard Horwood, and nice to meet you.” Richard closed his eyes. “Father in heaven, I’m feeling very lost and confused right now, but I know that to you, the way that I should follow is clear and straight. Please guide me in your infinite wisdom, and lead me along the path that leads to your service. You have blessed me with many gifts in my life, I am thankful for them all and give praise to you. Amen.”

“Dear Father, your servant Richard is in need of aid,” the Father added. “You know what his needs are better than I do, or he does, so help him along his way, and give him the strength to carry his burdens for your sake. All glory to your name, Amen.”

UPDATE: Okay, as of this writing, I’ve given feedback to 15, out of the other 34 bloggers who’ve participated in this challenge, and it’s been a really fun experience. If I haven’t posted a comment to your excerpt yet – I’ll do my best to get to you sometime this week – and for the 7 people who signed up and haven’t posted excerpts yet, I’ll keep checking your blog too.

This event has been really very much in line with what I wanted to be doing with Blogosphere Mondays – finding other bloggers who are sharing their own writing, letting them know what I thought, encouraging them – and attracting new readers to my own blog as well. Kinda fortuitous that the whole thing happened to be scheduled on a Monday already!

Out of curiosity, I started tracking the length of the different posted excerpts – partly because mine was stretching the 500 word limit. Well, I wasn’t alone. 22 of the excerpts were more than 500 words, ranging from 505 up to 972 words. (My 567 was more or less in the middle of that pack.) And there was one person who was exactly on 500, and twelve who were less, going from 257 up to 498. Sorry, my numbers geek is coming out to play now.

Oh, and all 3 of the founding blogfest members were over the 500 word limit that they imposed – 533 to 647 words.

Happy Blogfest, everybody.

Blogosphere Monday: Teralyn Rose Pilgrim

Sorry, today’s feature is going to be very short, because I’ve got a busy day and a headache. But I didn’t want to skip showcasing this week’s blogger.

Teralyn has lots of great stuff up about feedback, queries, finding an agent, and the energy and focus it takes to write. Check her spot out!

Nanowrimo: Just around the corner!

There’s only three days and a few-odd hours left until November starts, and with it comes National Novel Writing Month.

Even though October feels like it’s flown by, (and many of the items on my creative to-do list will remain unfinished,) I’m very excited. It’ll be great to see all my Nano-er friends at write-ins, I’ll be going back to San Fran for the Night of Writing Dangerously, (and staying in the Bay area for nearly two weeks this time!) and I just always love the creative boost that I get from going onto the Nanowrimo site during November.

There’s also my birthday somewhere in there.

I shared some of my snowflake notes with the Hamilton Writers group this week. Got some very excited and enthusiastic feedback, and some good suggestions, including plenty of ideas about how to make the fact that my main character is a dead person sent back to Earth by the angels in the body of another man into a HUGE surprise reveal nearly half-way through.

However, it seems like I need to come up with a catchy word to describe the concept of ‘a dead person sent back to Earth by the angels to complete a mission in the body of another person.’

Any ideas or suggestions? Also, if you’re going to be doing Nano this year – how ready are you?

A good review from fellow writers…

There’s nothing like hearing some positive feedback to lift your spirits.

I took the flash story ‘The onus of Grace’ to the Hamilton Writer’s meeting on Tuesday, and mentioned that I was thinking about expanding it into a longer piece for National Novel Writing Month. All the responses I got were really impressed and encouraging – a few questions about the setup of the characters, but also tons of praise about how the dialog seemed more natural and conversational than some of the stuff that I sometimes bring, and how the setup was a good way of introducing the idea that my main character had paranormal powers while still ‘hooking’ the reader with a bit of a mystery. In fact, I’m left with the idea that this scene, or some version of it, would be a good way to start the extended version, which wasn’t what I had planned, I’d meant to go back further to what I thought of as the beginning of the story. Hmm…

One of the other writers read a short essay about critique groups, how to tell when you’ve found a good critique group and make the best of it, and that sort of thing. Everybody liked the overall thrust of the article, though we had some minor polishing notes. I’m hoping to get her permission to repost it up at Stringing Words when it’s finished.

And that’s about all for now. Still looking forward to Nanowrimo, busy with work and driving lessons, made a Whedon Halloween Scavenger hunt video that I’ll probably put up on Youtube soon. Also have been working on proofreading one of my older Roswell fan fiction pieces, “Runaway with you.”

Taking serious criticism is a tough gig.

Possibly one of the hardest stages in any kind of artistic endeavour is having to open your work up to criticism.

I was invited, along with everybody else who was at the local Hamilton Writers meeting four weeks ago, to a new Hamilton Artists’ Writers Workshop. I was excited about giving it a try, and missed the first session owing to a confusion about the dates, but I was also nervous from the start about bringing something of my own to get critiqued by a group of unfamiliar writers.

I ended up bringing copies of a short story that I very much like, ‘The case of the Wizard’s Vice,’ a sort of Agatha Christie meets Harry Potter caper. Because there wasn’t an abundance of time, I only got to read the introduction and the denoument, skipping over the interviews in the middle, but the responses I got definitely had me thinking about the piece in a very different way, and had my head spinning for a little bit.

Significantly, most of the gathering seemed to agree that the choices I’d made to tell almost the entire story in dialog, and to avoid characterizing the Inspector/narrator more than absolutely necessary, were keeping them from relating to the characters or getting emotionally involved in the story. “Dialog fills in the plot,” somebody said. “Narration grounds you in the characters, and you have almost no narration here.”

There were a lot more notes, not all of which I’m going to review here, but… I think I’m not going to be able to start a fresh draft of the story immediately, which is probably good, I can give myself time to let it settle and ask a few writer friends what they think of the notes before immediately changing things. Still, I’m glad that I went and took a chance – it’s better to hear this sort of thing now than to keep thinking that the story is beautiful and flawless, and maybe start pushing hard to sell it without thinking of the ways that it could be made accessible to a different audience.

In other news, I have awarded the Versatile Blogger award to Merinda Brayfield, who’s also a long-time friend of mine from the #nanowrimo chat room. It’s nothing personal that I didn’t also give her the One Lovely Blog, but I felt that it didn’t entirely make sense to keep the two awards together the whole time, so unless I particularly want to award both of them to the same people, I’ll be picking just one or the other.

Feedback Swap update

Well, I’ve finally gotten myself in a better position with my critiquing swaps by now – I’ve finished the first Nano manuscript, ‘Duty’, and one screenplay. I’ve also half finished reading another Nanowrimo novel.

It’s strange, but it does seem that with a work of this size, how much I can bring on contribute to critiquing tends to depend on how well I can relate to it. ‘Duty’ was a sort of a medieval historical romance that I really liked, and once I got into it I was giving the author all kinds of scribbled comments in the margin of the Word document. I also made a point of going back and reviewing the chapters once I’d finished the first pass, grouping the chapters in terms of the major arcs of the story as I understood them, suggesting what she was doing well, what elements I thought weren’t working well, and how to improve the things that I could see she was trying to do, but that weren’t quite working yet.

The screenplay was a romantic comedy about wrestling fans, which isn’t something I immediately identify with, but the characters and the setup was charming, and I got into the spirit of it by the end, making notes on which jokes I liked and which bits didn’t seem so funny, and what I thought of the character arcs. I also took a stab at guessing what the theme was.

The second novel, though it has promise, also has a few issues in terms of the point of view and the voice, and in the actual layout and format with the way the author has chosen to work with dialog. (Here’s a hint, there aren’t conventional quote marks.) Though I’m doing my best to follow along, a long of my marginal notes so far are either fairly incidental nitpicks, or pointing out bits that I do particularly like. I guess I’m hoping that by the time I’m finished, I’ll be able to put together some notes that will address the deeper issues I see in this draft, more than just ‘you really need to rewrite this to make it easier to tell when somebody’s talking versus something is being described.’)

That’s pretty much all for tonight, except…

I’ve contacted my first winner for the OLB and VB awards – AP Roberts! Big surprise, hehe, as AP’s livejournal has been the only entry in my blogroll for months now.

I’m going to be changing a few things about this blog in the upcoming weeks, and hopefully updating a bit more frequently, so watch this space.

CritMo has set sail…

Next stop? A magical land where respectful, authentic, and specific feedback flows like – I dunno, maple sap or something?

So – over at Stringing Words, we’ve started doing a Critiquing Month, or CritMo. I volunteered to organize it, since there were interested writers, but all of the usual SuperAdmins seemed to be a bit too busy to jump at doing the legwork this time. Though SW has had 2 CritMos before, this is also the first time I’ve participated.

So far, it’s been a lot of fun, and very instructive. The basic idea was simple – you sign up to contribute a certain number of excerpts, and you’re assigned to critique two other pieces for each piece you contribute, so that each excerpt has at least two assigned critiquers. Along with your excerpt, you provide some questions or notes for what sort of feedback you’re interested in, and then you read the pieces that you’ve been assigned to critique and do your best to provide good feedback.

By the way, when I was blogging about what makes a good critique in early July, I was already planning for CritMo – I believe I mentioned that at the time.

So, this time we’re doing week by week assignments, four week-long periods during the month of August, and the first week is nearly drawn to a close – it goes until Tuesday night. I’ve finished the three critiques I signed up for this week, (we agreed to try a variation where people can pledge to do a third crit in the hopes of getting a third crit on their own work,) and received one critique on the lead-in to a fantasy short story.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

Reading for feedback, and composing feedback, can be very hard.

In the end, it’s so very worth it.

However, I’ve been so focused on CritMo that I haven’t really started on the 3 longer pieces that I’ve agreed to do feedback swaps on. Oh well, I’ll get to them – and I didn’t promise a particular completion date to anybody at least.

And, as a followup to my saga of mixed-up reservations in Huntsville, Saturday turned out to be a non-event. I packed up all my stuff carefully to take to the new room, went to the front desk – and was told that they’d arranged things so that I could stay in the same room until Tuesday. Ah well, at least it’s a nice room, and no stairs out to the lobby,

In search of some good feedback swaps.

I’ve started to like the idea of manuscript feedback swaps – two writers exchanging their complete drafts and each reading through the other’s and giving a detailed critique. I did two swaps for ‘The Long way Home’ back in January and early February of this year, and those notes gave me a lot of good stuff to work with on my recent draft revisions.

Now, I’ve gone back to the ‘Critiques, Feedbacks, and Novel Swaps’ forum at the National Novel Writing Month website, which is where I came across the idea in the first place… and the Script Swaps forum on the Script Frenzy website – but neither seem to be too active at this point in the summer, which is when I have a reasonable bunch of spare time to be reading and critiquing other people’s work. Sigh.

At this writing, I have gotten one swap offer at Script Frenzy, though, which I’m looking forward to – and two people from Nano Swaps have offered to critique my manuscript, but without sending me back anything to critique myself, which leaves me a little at loose ends until the critiques start coming back.

I’ve also been looking on google for other places to find swap partners, and there seem to be some possibilities, but I haven’t sifted through them all yet. One interesting one for screenplays is Screenwriters Utopia, which lets you upload your script into the database, and automates the process of releasing your script to others once you’ve posted critiques. On the other hand, they have a spot in the upload for a WGA registration number, and ‘strongly suggest’ that you should have your work registered before you upload. I’ve taken a quick look at registering my work with Writer’s Guild of Canada as a non-member, but I’m still not quite clear on how the payment process works.

So, any recommendations for good places to find feedback swap partners, year-round?

Oh, and a JulNoWriMo postscript – I got up to 50,004 words on Saturday morning, around 9 am. Still haven’t finished ‘Children of the Molecule’ – but then, I never expected to, in a month, and I can actually see that the end is not so far off at this point!