Responding to criticism

The dynamics in class workshopping or in a writer's group's workshopping is always interesting to note. My number one rule of workshopping is that you (the writer) should only ever put up your best work. If you know it's not working, but it's as good as you can get it, then fine. But if you know there's a problem, and you know how to fix it, then you should fix it before you give it to anyone else to critique. 

If you know your punctuation has been sloppy, but your friends are ace at fixing it so you think you don't have to bother, then that's just disrespectful. Everyone's time is important. Aren't you busy? Do you have loads of time to write? Or do you squeeze your writing in around a hundred other things the way most of us do?

So, you might think you haven't got time to check the spelling of that difficult word -- and, hey, you know there is a verb "curb", and you've seen the noun "curb" in the latest book you just had sent out from the States, so it must be right, right? Not if you're living in Australia (or Britain for that matter). In Australian usage, the noun is "kerb". You mightn't have time, but if you don't do it, you're taking up your workshopping buddies' time. Some of them are going to have to look the word up. It might take you an hour to fix the punctuation, but if you have ten friends and they're all spending an hour on it, it's not very fair, is it? Trust me: their time is just as important to them as yours is to you. And, if they're not busy looking at all the stuff you know how to fix, they might just have the time to see something more in your story that they otherwise might have missed -- the forest for the trees, and all that sort of stuff!

But what about when you're in the workshop. In the typical Clarion workshop (and many other serious workshops), the person being workshopped is not allowed to speak until everyone has said their piece. There's a good reason for this. There's nothing worse than someone who argues with every point that you make. (Yes, you've swapped hats now.) If people don't want criticism, they shouldn't put up their stories for workshopping. They shouldn't feel compelled to defend every word their written. After all, it's been put up because they want feedback on how to improve it, right? Not because they want their egos stroked. Well, that's the theory. The trouble is that some people do put up their stories so they can be told how brilliant they are.

I remember spending a lot of time workshopping a story that I thought needed a lot of work, and then the author very smugly telling me and the rest of the group that the story was already published. What a waste of my time. Not just disrespectful but rude as well. Did that mean we all didn't know what we were talking about? Not at all. I'm sure we've all read published stories we thought could have been better. Perhaps the writer (who was new to our group) had no trust in our abilities as workshoppers, but from that point forward we had no trust in her as a serious writer who was making good use of our freely given time.

A good workshopper will give specific, rather than vague comments. So, not: "This sucked big time, and I hated it..." but something more along the lines of: "I thought your setting and characterisation were great, but your POV was all over the place, and all that head-hopping made me dizzy..." 

Good feedback will point you in the direction you need to go to get things working more effectively. Good feedback is constructive, not destructive -- with any negative comments justified and a balanced reporting of what works in the story as well. This is important, not just to help preserve the writer's faith in their story, but because someone else might have knocked the very thing that you loved, and the workshopper needs to know that you did love this aspect -- that it did work for some readers.

I'm currently going through reader comments on my novel, and trying to address a saggy middle. As I'm reading through the chapters, I keep seeing opportunities to expand, expand, expand. (Add more characterisation here, put a few more thoughts in there...) I'm working through, looking at scene purpose, commenting on how well I think the scene is working and how I can address any problems. I thought by now I'd be distant enough to be able to see these problems manifesting themselves, but I'm struggling. What should I do? Consider that I'm right and my reader is wrong? This could be the case -- it is always something you need to think about -- but sadly and happily for me, I don't think this is true. Why sadly and why happily? Sadly, because I know dealing with the problem is going to entail more work, and I'm going to have to keep wrestling with it, but happily because I also know the book will be stronger when I emerge out from under it. And really that's exactly why I asked my reader to read it.

Who do you write for?

I'm a great believer in writing your first draft for yourself -- not getting hung up on who your audience is, whether your protagonist's age is going to be more suited to children's fiction or YA, whether your audience is going to prefer first person, present tense; third person, past tense; or some other combination. The first draft should be for the story -- and if you're lucky enough to write in that white-hot streak of creativity where the words are pouring out, then you should let them pour. Don't hold them up with some internal editor. Let that come later.

When the draft is finished, it's great to have a gut read: a quick read where you mark passages that aren't working, logic problems, places where the pacing sags. This isn't a fine line edit -- in fact, I don't allow myself to hold a pen when I'm doing a gut read. If I have a pen in my hand, then I'll be tempted to correct those little typos, the missing apostrophe, and I'll lose the impetus of the story. I'll do my gut read with a highlighter and just put a vertical line alongside the parts that aren't working. Then I'll come back later and look at these passages more critically, more analytically, but not during the gut read -- this is just time to note the problem and move on.

Then comes the next draft (and the next and the next). If you're writing for publication, then this is the time when you need to start thinking about your audience. Who are you writing for? Is this story suited to your target audience? Is it too complex for children? Too unsophisticated for adults? Too boring for teenager? Is the language appropriate? What about sentence structure and length? Are the paragraphs too dense? Too long? Is there a good mix of narrative to dialogue? Are you showing rather than telling? Are you opening up enough story questions for your reader to want to keep reading? Is there enough conflict? Does the tension escalate? There are lots of things to think about.

If you're not writing for publication, then you don't have to worry about these questions. You're writing for yourself so you can just do what you want. There's nothing wrong with not writing for publication, as long as you are clear that this is what you're doing. Most serious writers, however, do want to be published, and if you do want to be published then at some stage you need to think about your market and what that market wants -- what the gatekeepers (editors) who select the stories that will be published want. What are they publishing? Why? Go take a look at their recent releases -- are they like your book? How? How are they different? If they're not at all like your book, are you targeting the right publisher? Research is the key.

Some writers write for different audiences and use different pseudonyms so that the reader is clear about what type of book they're buying -- for example, Megan Lindholm writes urban fantasy but epic fantasy as Robin Hobb. Iain Banks writes mainstream fiction, but science fiction as Iain M Banks. Some children's writers will write erotic fiction using a pseudonym to protect their identity. It's all about meeting reader expectations. I know writers who love Robin Hobb stories but not Megan Lindholm ones, and others who love only the Megan Lindholm ones. It helps if you're a reader to know which books are which, and it helps as a writer to know this too, as it dictates your approach. Knowing your audience isn't about shutting doors, but opening them -- helping you to get your book through the doors you want to get it through.

Draft's finished

So this was my plan for the holidays:

2 weeks: working on novel and finishing draft (included going in to work one day for staff meeting)
1 week: stuff for classes
1 week: R&R -- movies, bowling, walking, reading, reading, reading

This is how it's panned out:

3 weeks + : working on novel (and reading one and a half books)
rest: doing the rest of the stuff, which I suspect means very little R&R. Never mind.

This editing pass has taken a lot longer than I expected. The rewrite started at 195 k approx, and finished at 185,663, which was my starting point for this editing pass. It's finished at 178,285. There's something nice about being in the 170s. It's still not quite as low as I'd like, but it's a big story, and I had a horrible thought that I was adding words rather than cutting!

And today it's finished, other than some minor adjustments (I hope) after I get it back from my readers. In the end I cut two-thirds of the words with general tightening -- things like getting rid of prep phrases, cutting repetitions etc. But there were four things I cut at the end that took out a couple of thousand between them:

(i) a scene from the POV from someone whom I'd taken out as a viewpoint character -- so how did this slip through? I think in the end, I'd decided to keep it because it was towards the end of the novel, and he is a viewpoint character in the second, and so it seemed like foreshadowing. The trouble with not using him was that the one viewpoint character in that scene was now dead, and so couldn't convey the scene. In the end though, there was nothing in the scene that was essential to the plot. Wholesale cut. Easy solution.

(ii) cut the guts out of another scene. This was a scene involving a telepathic conversation, where the main character reveals something she's about to do (at the beginning of the next book), which is going to have serious repercussions. I really liked this scene. It seemed like good foreshadowing of the trouble that was to come. The characters she's conversing with used several techniques to get her to change her mind, all to no avail. Heaps of conflict. Snappy dialogue. Fast paced. Working well. Only, when I looked at it again, I thought -- she wouldn't tell them. And she wouldn't. And that was that. It had to go. All of it. All those lovingly crafted words. Gone. A scene has to serve the story, and while the foreshadowing was good, the characters have to be true to themselves. Absolutely. One hundred per cent. And she wasn't being. Really, too, readers are going to get that the consequences for her are going to be dire. They're quite good at picking up the hints -- and we writers have to be good at leaving them room to work!

(iii) and (iv) two nice moments between two of my main characters -- the first from one's point of view, and then a reflection on what had happened from the other character's POV. Neither of these were huge -- a couple of paras each, but this whole idea contained within was no longer relevant after other changes I'd made to them and their relationships with one another. Or not at this point. I may rejig this to reflect something else and use it in the next book. I'm not sure at this point. I do like the idea of what went on, but it just wasn't necessary. Zap. Gone.

On the other hand, there was an earlier scene where I'd cut out a half-page incident between the two of them when I was doing the rewrite, and when I came across it again, I was really sad that I'd done this, so I put it back in the editing pass. Not wholly the way it was. I didn't dig out that earlier draft -- just captured the essence of the exchange in a quarter of the space. It's not essential to the plot, but is a nice character moment for them both, helps define the shifting dynamics of their relationship.

So, as much as I've not had the chance to have that R&R, I have a great sense of satisfaction at having completed this draft. It really is a great feeling!

Making the changes

I'm a bit light on blogging at the moment because I'm fully immersed in my editing pass over my manuscript. The rewriting's finished, and I'm two-thirds (three-quarters?) through the edit, and I'm loving it. The process, that is.

Some days are better than others though. A few days I got to a scene that just wasn't working for me -- too passive, too much telling of things after the event. The fix wasn't too difficult. I moved the scene backwards in time so that I could show the events as they were unravelling. It's not an action scene, but it feels a lot more active now. Of course it meant I added about 400 words, at a time I'm desperate to cut words. That said, I've eliminated nearly 3000 at about the halfway point, so I'm on target. (Well, I would've liked to get rid of 10-15k, but realistically that was never going to happen because I'm also trying to add some characterisation and some non-plot related thinking.)

The day before yesterday, though, I came across a different kind of hurdle. Let me backtrack... When I started the edit pass, I had a brainwave about how to increase one of the main character's motivations so wrote a new scene that I banged in at the start of her story, and have been editing along the way to take this into account. It was all working beautifully until I got to the midway point and realised that I'd undermined one of the basic tenets that I'd based my alien culture's society on. Oh, dear. What to do? In the end such decisions can only be made when taking into account what will most benefit the story. And this time having the stronger motivation is a definite plus, so I've had to rethink that aspect of their society. It took me most of a day to sort that out, so I felt frustrated at the end of the day with how little progress I'd made, but the main thing was that I had made progress, and that I'd ironed out what could've been a problem further down the track. And in fact it still might -- but I'll be looking for it as I continue editing and will be able to fix it as I go. Bring it on!

Progress

Well, today I've officially passed the halfway mark with the rewrite of my novel, which is exciting. This is the last rewrite I'll do (unless some editor signs me on and wants me to do more, of course!). I love rewriting. I love fleshing things out, tightening up phrasing, making the dialogue more oblique, honing images, adding texture. But I'm conscious with this draft that I have to cut words. This draft started at about 193,000 words, which is too long for a first novel. Too big a risk for a publisher to take. So I'm aiming to finish with 170,000. I'm down to 188,000 so far so have got a fair bit of cutting to do yet.

What worries me is I've removed whole chapters from the first half and cut a few POV characters, and all I've lost is 5,000 words. Still, when I've finished I'll do a final editing pass -- in the past I've done the cut-ten-words-out-of-every-page approach, and that's helpful too. With the novel at well over 600 pages, that's 6000 words straightaway. And really, I've reworked the beginning more recently than the end -- I abandoned an earlier draft that was a tightening draft because I decided the whole thing needed rewriting, which is what I'm doing now. So, the words should come out of the second half more easily than the first. At least that's what I'm hoping. If not it will be tighten, tighten, tighten.

Many of my students come into Novel 2 having done short story writing as well. They all know that in a short story every word has to count. But I tell them that every word has to count in a novel as well. There's no room for padding, for flab. We all want to write the best novels we can -- novels that make the readers stay up well past when they want to go to bed, and flabbiness is a surefire way to put them right off. So I'm going to relish my cutting -- that's what editing is about: taking a rough stone and polishing it until it becomes a gem.

Rewriting

I'm currently in the middle of a major rewrite of my first novel. I call it a major rewrite because I am retyping the text -- it's not just an edit where I fiddle with the language or add a bit more setting here or sharpen an image there. I talk to my students about the importance of re-vision, as opposed to just revision, the act of re-seeing the novel, reimagining it.

The way I approach this is to have a quick reread over what I've already written, and then think about what I was trying to achieve in that scene, and whether the scene is as effective as it can be. Then I have to put the old scene aside and have another go at it, without looking at what I've written. I can't look over it again, or I find I'm just copying the same sentences, perhaps with a few minor changes. Totally pointless.

It's easy to re-vision a scene that feels flabby or that isn't working as hard as it can. It's the scenes I'm really happy with that I find the hardest, because there's always that temptation to go with what's already down. But the rewritten scenes are invariably stronger than the original, so I have to resist that urge. When I'm finished, I can always compare the two and take back anything that seems absolutely fabulous that has now been omitted. Occasionally, I do take a sentence or two, but often these are moved to someplace new.

The draft is chugging along nicely, and it's the first draft I've been really happy with, so now I just have to make sure I keep my bum on my seat and keep at it.