How to GIVE a Critique

by Annette Lyon

Some time ago, I did a two-part series on how to take and use a critique. Find part I here and part II here.

I got a lot of great feedback from those posts, after which Precision Editing reader (and personal friend) DeNae suggested I address the opposite side of the fence, which is today's topic:

How do you GIVE a critique?

I admit that I've meant to write about this topic for months, but I had a hard time grabbing hold of how to approach it. I finally realized why, and the reason is simple:

Not all critiques are created equal.

I've known the writers in my critique group for over a decade. I trust them with my work. They trust me with theirs. They can totally rip my chapter to shreds, and I'll walk away liking them just as much as before (or maybe more, because they're helping me grow). I can do the same to them.

But what if a brand new writer comes to me asking for feedback, and I give the same type of brutal honesty to them?

I'm guessing emotional implosion, or something close to it.

One reason is that a brand new writer likely hasn't developed a thick skin yet.

Another reason is that I'm a perfect stranger. Even for me, it's far easier for me to take a harsh critique from a member of our group than a mild edit from an anonymous editor.

Before you give someone a critique, you'll need to address the following issues:

How experienced is this writer?

If they're just starting out, you could squelch their enthusiasm pretty easily, even if their work is relatively good. Be gentle.

I've often heard that a good critique will have at least 2 positive comments for each negative one. Trust me; my group doesn't work that way. Not even almost. But we don't need to, either. We have history together, trust and respect as colleagues.

But the 2/1 method probably does work well when someone is starting out. Don't stress over getting the perfect ratio of positive and negative, but do make sure to point out what the new writer is doing well.

If, on the other hand, the writer is seasoned, you probably don't need to include everything you liked, and you can likely be more direct about what you think needs fixing.

Find out what Kind of Feedback Is Wanted

Sometimes a writer may want big picture feedback, things like whether the conflict is engaging, the pacing tight, the characters and motivations believable, if you spot any plot holes, and the like.

Other times, they want a closer read, more like a line edit, where you catch repeated words, typos, and awkward writing on line-by-line level.

Knowing what kind of feedback you're giving will influence how you read the work (On the computer? On your e-reader?), what you'll focus on, and even how much time you'll spend on it.

Say What, Where and Why

And be specific doing so.

If you can, target specific issues and then explain, in detail, how to improve in those areas. Few things frustrate a writer more than generic feedback. "Loved it" and "Hated it" are both useless, because we don't know where or (more importantly) why. Be specific.

Examples of targeted positive feedback:

"Great use of point of view here."

"Love how well you showed the emotion this paragraph."

"Great description. I could totally see and smell the forest."

"This conversation has excellent dialog—each character has a unique voice."

"This part is so creepy . . . excellent tension!"

Examples of targeted critical feedback:

"I'm unsure whose point of view we're in here. I think we've hopped heads since the last page."

"Could you show her crying instead of telling us she's sad?"

"This scene could use a few more details about the setting. I can't see where they are."

"This conversation feels like nothing but voices. I can't follow who's saying what."

"The pace lags a bit on this page. Tighten it a bit."

Be Open to Questions

If something you mentioned in your critique is unclear, the writer should be able to approach you for clarification without any worry.

Know When to Say No

Writers who are serious are teachable. Pretend you've helped Writer A with a critique. They've supposedly revised, and they want you to read more of their work. You open the new file, only to see the exact same issues you pointed out before.

Maybe the writer didn't understand your suggestions.

Maybe they aren't ready for a real critique and would rather be ego-stroked.

Maybe they want to hurry up and put their work up as an e-book without putting in the apprenticeship work required to become a true wordsmith and storyteller.

In those cases, it's best to politely walk away. Any critique you'll give at that point is a waste of everyone's time.

You'll know you did a great job when the writer comes back to you and says that you helped them make their work so much better, and thank you!

That's a huge reward all by itself.

Congrats to Lon Dee & Julie Wright!

We are happy to announce book releases here by our blog followers. Please let us know when you have a new release!

Congrats to Lon Dee on his three new book releases: Amira, Borneo Fever, and The Power of Powers. Learn more about these books on Lon Dee's Official Site. Check out the covers below:








Also, Congrats to Julie Wright on her newest book: Olivia. More about The Newport Ladies Book Club series can be found on the Newport Ladies Blog.

Using Social Media Effectively

by Annette Lyon

Social media is here. And for better or worse, it's here to stay. Writers who hope to reach potential readers need to learn how to use it effectively.

What "effectively" means will be different for every writer. With more and more social media outlets popping up all the time, it's easy to feel daunted. (I have yet to learn much about Pinterest, because right now it's just one more thing.)

While social media is important to your platform, it carries a danger: You can easily spend so much time networking that you don't get around to writing.

So learn what you can about different social media sites. Decide what works best for you. Focus on those and leave the others behind. For example, if blogging is more than you think you can handle, then don't blog.

I personally blog (here and at my own blog), and I rely on Facebook and Twitter for much of my networking. When I do them right, they don't suck up much time from my day. I don't play games of Facebook, for example. I use it to keep in touch with friends and family as well as to keep in contact with readers.

I use Twitter for several things, among them, to keep up on the news. I follow several news streams, and I often find out about breaking news before it hits TV. I follow industry professionals like editors and agents. I follow other writers, great writing resources, topics that interest me, and so forth. I even follow some people simply because they're entertaining and make me laugh.

That's what I do when I hang out on Twitter and Facebook.

But what do I actually post on there?

I am no expert on social media, but I have learned several things along the way:

Content Is King.

If you have lame tweets ("I'm petting my cat"), no one will want to follow you. Watch other people's streams. see what interests you and figure out what parts of your life others might find interesting.

Share links to articles or other online content that you find interesting. This includes forwarding links or tweets from those you follow. Doing so creates good will with the person whose work you're sharing, and it gives your followers good content. Win-win.

Be real.

Followers can (and will) smell fake a mile away and unfollow/unfriend in a heartbeat.

Be social.

In other words, be part of the conversation. Reply to people, especially if they initiate contact. Add your personal commentary on topics you find interesting and relevant. Don't be an island.

Update live.

Some applications let you pre-schedule your tweets. As many people attach their Facebook status updates to their Twitter feeds, both get updated at the same time with no work from you.

That may be great for a few things, say reminding people you'll be on TV in ten minutes (you can't tweet that from the set or while driving), but in general, try to really be there behind the keyboard. Interact. This goes back to being REAL.

Do not post about religion and politics.

Really. Ever. Just don't go there.

Forget yourself and your work. Mostly.

Sure, you'd like the whole social media thing to result in sales. It could. But if you get sales from social media, it'll almost certainly be a secondary effect because first you created a relationship.

Keep this in mind: the relationship comes first. (See below.) Your work and sales come a very distant second.

In practical terms, this means that the vast majority of your updates should not be about your latest release. Constant tweets and status updates about "Get my first three chapters free!" or, "Buy my book! It's got lots of 5-star reviews!" become nothing but annoying noise. You'll quickly sound like a used-car salesman, and the unfollows will be huge.

Sure, go ahead and mention revisions or release dates. If they're the exception, not the rule, people will actually notice and care.

ABOVE ALL: Create relationships.

This doesn't mean you have to be everyone's best friend, but try to be kind and aware of who is out there, who is following, who is re-tweeting your stuff, and so forth. Be gracious.

A story as an example of what not to do:

Once I followed a writer on Twitter who immediately sent me a thank you in a direct message. Odd, I thought, but okay. Neat for her to thank all new followers. I guess.

But then her stream turned into lots of self-promotion, constant requests for re-tweets (but she didn't retweet anything unrelated to her), links to her latest posts, and little else. I unfollowed.

I don't remember exactly why, but later I followed her again, maybe trying to give her another shot. Right off, I got an almost identical direct message to the first, which was phrased as if we were meeting for the first time. She obviously didn't remember that I'd followed her before (or left comments on her blog or had any other contact).

To make matters worse, every few weeks, I got a notification that she was following me. Remember: you get notifications only for new followers. Meaning she'd followed and unfollowed me a number of times. I dug around and discovered that she had a bag of tricks for increasing her follower count. Among them was regularly using an app that let you drop followers who weren't valuable (however it determined that). She'd apparently dropped me and added me about six times, all while I followed and never dropped her.

This all left a pretty sour taste in my mouth. I've since unfollowed her and will not follow again.

And you can be darn sure I won't be buying her books or recommending her to anyone else.

I've had similar experiences on Facebook, with people making comments on my status or my wall with little more than, "Hey, check out my book!" In some cases, it's been phrased a bit more cleverly, like, "Who's your favorite wizard? You might find a new favorite in TITLE!" (Which is, of course, their book.)

If Twitter and Facebook are too much, don't stress it. But if you want to use them, learn how to use them effectively and then be real. Above all, don't be a used car salesman. Everyone hates those people, and we all run the other direction.

Additional note:

To learn more about Twitter, how it works, and how to use it as a writer, see this interview with Christina Katz on the topic. She's also someone to follow: @TheWriterMama

A great resource for learning about social media, specifically for writers, is Kristen Lamb's We Are Not Alone: A Writer's Guide to Social Media. Follow her on Twitter: @KristenLambTX

Oh, and on Twitter I'm @AnnetteLyon.

Staying True to Your Characters

by Annette Lyon

I love reading a book where the characters are so well-drawn that they feel real. Where I read a description or action and know exactly why this character said, acted, or described something a specific way.

Writing characters that are round instead of flat, who seem to breathe off the page instead of walk around like paper dolls, is hard.

Some time ago I posted about character lenses. That concept is one of my favorite tools for characterization, ever. If you haven't read that post, go read it now to brush up on what I mean by "lenses."

Short version: It's the unique way each character views the world. (But the post explains it in greater detail.)

The crucial part:

Creating a lens does you no good unless that lens colors every page that the character shows up on. If we see it for the first time on page 287, it's useless.

Here are some ways to give your character a lens:

A Defining Characteristic

I've visited the house of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius twice in my lifetime. Both times, a trait of his stood out to me: he was a synesthete, meaning he had what's known as synesthesia.

Synethesia is when two senses that wouldn't normally cross, do. One synesthete may see colors with letters. Another may associate a personality with numbers, and so on.

For Sibelius, sound had color. He had a painting hanging in his house with a lot of a specific shade of yellow that, to him, was D Major. A bright green fireplace was the exact shade of F major. (Apparently he "saw" only major keys, not minor.)

Give your character something that distinguishes them, like synesthesia . . . or something less dramatic.

Does your synesthete hear a shrill minor key when walking in city traffic? Does a lullaby evoke a peaceful light blue? If we learn how your character interacts with their world through their individual attributes, everything will be more alive, even if that attribute isn't nearly as "out there" as synesthesia.

Passions

What really gets your character excited?

If it's food, then a totally awesome event should be described in terms of European chocolate or a favorite restaurant's cuisine.

If your character loves to knit, use terms about yarn, stitches, gauges, needles, and the frustration of frogging.

If it's motorcycles, use terms that evoke the passion, whether it's rev and gear, or other things, like the challenge of fixing the engine yourself, running out of gas, a flat tire, or the thrill of wind in your hair.

If your character is a football star and experiences something totally exciting, don't describe it as heavenly; describe it as feeling like he won the Super Bowl.

Career/Talents

Whatever your character is good at is likely something that will color their lens.

For some old friends of mine, that would be theater. I could write about an actor and use theater terms to color experiences in the story, events in the story that of themselves have nothing to do with theater. Think green room, opening night jitters, break a leg, flop, standing ovation, etc.

Brandon Sanderson does this well in his Way of Kings. A main character is a soldier, but he's no ordinary soldier; as a boy, he was trained to be a surgeon. He views life (and the battlefield) in terms of a surgeon. He doesn't just see blood; he knows exactly where the man was pierced with a sword and how it must have missed an artery, because of the way the blood flows.

Background

Dad grew up as a farm boy. Mom grew up in a metropolitan European city. People used to joke that they were the embodiment of the Green Acres TV show, and the idea wasn't that far off.

When Dad saw my sister watching Charlotte's Web and crying, he shook his head and said, "Pigs are dirty. And they're food." By this point, he was a professor, but it was the farm boy speaking.

Mom, on the other hand, to this day, finds her eye drawn every time she passes a Jaguar on the road. The metropolitan girl is still there.

A different way of looking at it: A few years ago, PEG's own Heather Moore and I co-chaired a writing conference, and as part of our duties, we picked up a literary agent from the airport. On the way to dinner, she commented about how gorgeous the mountains were.

This was mid-March. As northern Utahns know, that's probably the ugliest time of year for our dear mountains. But for someone who'd never seen mountains like this, close up, they were beautiful.

In a story, a Utahn might not notice the mountains unless the seasons were changing, especially in the fall. But a transplant would.

Along the same vein, a tourist might walk the streets of Manhattan, head back to see the tops of the skyscrapers, and a local would know right away that the other person is a tourist. Locals don't gaze upward at the skyscrapers.

In every scene, get into your point-of-view character's head and mindset. That could mean more than one of these elements. Perrin in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series uses both black smith imagery and wolf imagery as his lens, and both totally work.

As you think about your characters, you'll not so much create a lens for them as much as discover what's already there.

Upcoming Live Critiquing Workshop: March 3, 2012

Back by popular demand . . .

Our next LIVE CRITIQUING WORKSHOP:

March 3, 2012
American Fork Library
64 South 100 East, American Fork, UT
Doors open: 10:00 a.m.
Workshop: 10:30 a.m. -- 3:30 p.m.

Includes one hour lunch break, lunch on your own

Registration deadline: Feb 25, 2012

**Limited Space**

Payments to: www.paypal.com
Pay $35.00 to PayPal account: editor@precisioneditinggroup.com
**include "PEG Workshop" in the notes
**include your email address in the notes if different from your paypal address
(you don't need a PayPal account to do this)

Instructors include our very own editors:
Annette Lyon (Best of State winner, Whitney Award winner, author of historical fiction, women's fiction, romance, middle grade fantasy, non-fiction, including a cookbook)

Josi S. Kilpack (Whitney Award winner, author of women's fiction, romance, suspense, and culinary mysteries)

Lu Ann Staheli (Best of State winner in non-fiction, Best of State educator, author of celebrity memoirs, and columnist)

Heather B. Moore (Best of State winner, Whitney Award winner, author of historical fiction, women's fiction, and non-fiction)

Julie Wright (Whitney Award winner, author of middle grade science fiction, time-travel, contemporary young adult, women's fiction, and romance)

Bring:
15 pages of your manuscript, double-spaced, 12 point type
**Make 6 copies for your critique table

(We may not get through all 15 pages, but we should get through at least 10)


Questions? Email us: editor@precisioneditinggroup.com

Official PEG Workshops Blog Here

In Writing, Nothing Is Black and White

by Annette Lyon

Recently at a meeting with my critique group, we got to talking about giving advice to other writers. All of the members of my group have spoken at writing conferences, at workshops, in classrooms. And we've all had aspiring writers come to us with specific questions.

We all try to help as best we can. But there's a little secret behind all our advice:

In writing, there are no black and white answers.

• The craft and industry has some general rules, yes. But you can find exceptions to just about every rule.
• You can find plenty of successful writers who violate rules all over the place.
• What works for me may not work for you.
• And while it pains me to say this: this includes grammar and punctuation, to a point.

Whether it's outlining, point of view, character development, world building, finding time to write, getting over writer's block, or a hundred other things, no one has the ultimate answer.

Really.

That said, figuring out what works most of the time and for most people is useful.

Learning the acceptable rules of grammar and punctuation will be in your favor . . . so that when you need to violate them, you can do so effectively and purposefully.

Following industry expectations usually plays in your favor when seeking publication, so you can come across as a professional.

You may be the exception. Or not.

So . . . How do you know if you are?

Um, yeah. Another tricky question. You can't really know, at least, at first. Figuring it out takes time and practice. And a lot of both.

My advice: learn the rules. Learn to use them well. Figure out why they're rules in the first place. That could mean years of practice.

You can't know what works for you until you do. So try outlining. If that just isn't you, try pantsing it. Chances are you're somewhere between the two extremes. Play around until you find the place on the continuum that fits you best.

You'll have far more success finding your own way than trying to duplicate someone else's journey to publication.

No writer follows the same path as any other. You'll find obstacles unique to you, things you need to figure out on your own. Things that, frustrating as that is, may not have a clear black and white answer.

None of this is to say to ignore the instruction of writing teachers, to stop going to conferences, to stop reading blogs like this one, or to abandon writing books, podcasts, and the rest.

Rather, it means to expose yourself to as many different ways of viewing the writing process and the rules behind it so that you can find your personal niche.

If something a writing teacher passes along doesn't resonate with you, that's okay. Maybe another writer's way of viewing the same issue will work better for you.

Along the way, you'll stumble upon situations where you'll want to do something out of the lines. If you've put in the work, you'll know if you can do that. You'll be able to do it better than if you tried going into it blind. And coming out the other end, you'll know why it worked.

So: Learn as much as you can. Read lots. Practice writing even more than that. Figure out which rules work best for you.

You'll eventually discover what is your black, your white

Poisoned Apples

By Julie Wright

I've recently discovered the TV series Once Upon a Time. For someone like me, who is an avid junkie of all things fairytale, this is a delightful series. I only wish I'd discovered it when it had moved into its second or third season so I could buy the DVDs and watch at my own leisure.

While I was at ABC's website streaming the first few episodes (available for a short time only), I found the comments list. It was during the second episode. I was waiting for the show to buffer so scrolled down to see what else there was to do, because I am a chronic multi-tasker and really hate even a few seconds of idle time. One of the comments was,

"Inconsistency with the apples...she says honeycrisp tree then hands Emma a red delicious. I know, I know, it's small, but details like that are important to me."

There were several comments about the honeycrisp. Apparently a lot of people know their apples. I didn't actually catch the error, because I don't know apples, but I found the comments interesting--comments like, "I know it's small, but details like that are important to me."

There is power in getting the details right.

Don't get me wrong. I totally understand the frustration that research brings. I know what it's like to get to a place where I simply don't know how it really works. That's one of the reasons I set aside a book I'd felt very strongly about. I was lost in the research and realized that until I could commit to the research, I had no business writing the book. It's easy to let little details go while thinking, "How many people really know what a honeycrisp apple looks like anyway?"

The answer is: A lot of people.

And them knowing the right answer when the writer got it wrong yanks them out of the story. Some readers will roll their eyes and dive back into the story. Others will roll their eyes and TRY to dive back in, but they'll keep surfacing so they can do another eye roll, and the book loses some of its original excitement. And others will roll their eyes and walk away because they can't get past the fact that the writer got it wrong.

For them, a wrong apple turned into something toxic--poisonous to their ability to suspend disbelief.

It takes time to get the details right, but it takes even more time to try to win back readers who feel like you've failed them. Don't set a volcano in Sweden if you aren't sure about whether or not such a thing could exist. Don't trust to just Google or Wiki for your sources (though they are great resources). Take a moment and call the hospital to talk to their night shift nurse to find out a detail about how his/her shift works or what protocol is for seeing a patient. Call the post office to find out how much it would cost to mail a pot of gold back to Ireland. Call an STD hotline to find out actual statistics (though they might ask you what your symptoms are and think the "writing a book" is just a cover story). Go ride a horse, go rockclimbing, go  . . . DO whatever it is you have your character doing (within reason--if your character is jumping off the Empire State Building, you definitely should not do that).

I had a teenager who wanted to be a writer ask me for the most important bit of advice I felt I could give. I told him to: Go. Live. Life.

See, taste, smell, hear, touch life. Your own experiences are your best research.

Bite into a honeycrisp.
But make sure not to pick one from the tree where the queen used to live. Better to not take chances.