Guard Your Time

I was on vacation a couple of years ago when I got an email from a former critique group partner. At first I couldn't even recognize his name, but I opened the email because it was kind of familiar.

 It started by praising my suggestions in the past as the most valuable he'd ever gotten (I don't remember being brilliant, but okay) and then telling me the great news. He'd finished his book! It wasn't one of the ones I'd seen, but a new one. He'd had many health issues, so it had been very hard to write, but he'd pushed through.

I looked again at his name, and then I remembered. That guy! He'd turned in sections of different stories as part of this one novel-length group I'd been in. He had argued with me about every point I ever made. I don't think he ever changed anything in response to my suggestions, and later on, he stopped participating. Except now he wanted my help.

Okay. I mean, I blog for QueryTracker, and I teach query-writing workshops, and I've done what I consider mentoring. I can see why he might think I'd do this.

Without asking anything about my life, he then explained that he wanted me to read his novel, edit it, and tell him how to publish it.

Mmhmm. Of course you do.

Here's where I will now jump in and admit I did the next thing wrong.

What I should have done was deleted the email right here and never thought about it again. Let him think I was dead or that I was so special that I'd forgotten everyone I'd met on the way up to stardom (pardon me while I laugh a bit) or that my personal secretary had deleted the message by accident.

I should have guarded my time, so I'm going to pass this on to you, dear QueryTracker readers: guard your time. You have been given twenty-four hours every day to spend on an assortment of activities. Your writing (and associated efforts) take time, so you need to budget your time.

Critiquing other writers is an excellent use of your time. Interacting with other writers is going to help both you and them by creating relationships. You'll form loose partnerships with other writers and discover how much you have in common as well as what makes you different. You'll learn and they'll learn. You'll encourage each other. You'll inform each other.

But at the same time, note that some people are not going to give as much as they expect you to give them. They think it's fine to join a query-letter critique forum and immediately post their critique, their synopsis, and their first five pages, then never comment on anyone else's submissions. When they have what they want, they leave. With those folks, they don't want a give-and-take relationship, so it's okay to back off.

Anyhow, I made a mistake and answered this guy. I said I was sorry to hear he'd had health problems but glad to hear he'd finished his book. I pointed him toward QueryTracker.net as a resource for finding literary agents.

And then I told him (Dumb, Jane. Dumb) that I'd look over his first three chapters, but not the whole book. I told him I didn't have time to do an edit, but I could give some overall comments based on the first three chapters. Besides, I explained, most of the errors a writer makes will evidence themselves in the first three chapters, so that would be enough.

He wrote back and sent the whole book.

"Once you start it," he said, "you will want to read the whole thing."

(Imagine my "What the hell?" face.)

I opened the document. It was 300,000 words.

I'm going to repeat that: three. hundred. thousand. words.

The first chapter alone was forty pages long, and it was filled with all the same mistakes he'd been making a decade earlier. So I guess I'd given him the most valuable feedback anyone ever had, but that doesn't mean he'd opted to follow it.

And this is the second thing I'm going to point out about takers. It's not just that they don't give back when a community generously shares with them. Of course we all start out as information-sinks rather than information-sources. That's the nature of learning.

The difference is that someone who wants to belong to a community comes to that community with an attitude of participation. They want to work.

They want to grow. So they look hard at where they're falling short and focus on those areas. They keep reassessing, and they keep retargeting their efforts.

The taker who shows up and says, "Fix my query so I can get a bestseller" isn't willing to put in the effort. The person who sits around for an hour or so trying to think of who in their critiquing past might know how to get a book published, then launches their book in that person's general direction even when that person says no, isn't willing to put in the effort. And this interaction showed it.

Why? First, no sense of what the market will bear. Three hundred thousand words is three times longer than most publishers will consider from a first-time author.

Second, no evidence that he'd in any way tried to improve his craft. The only thing he'd changed in a decade was his subject matter.

And third, he'd invested nothing in trying to restore a realtionship with the person he was culling for a favor that would involve at least a hundred hours of her time. Just, "Get me published."

Since chapters should be ten pages long rather than forty, and I'd volunteered to read three, I read the first ten pages and skimmed the next twenty. I sent him some suggestions, starting with removing all the unnecessary stage directions and repetition, removing the head-hopping, and beginning where the story actually began. I rewrote a 550-word paragraph to show how you could do it at half the length.

He never replied, proving how right I'd been to guard my time.

Reading that book would have taken weeks; critiquing it would have taken even longer, and what would have been the result? Would he have pared that book down to a slimmer volume or maybe a trilogy? Or would he have decided I was just an ignorant hater and looked for someone who would snap their fingers and publish his work?

Guard your time. Nurture relationships with other writers who are interested in you and your work as well as their own. Trade critiques, and when you find brilliant critique partners, invest your efforts in working with them. In fact, seek them out by reading their work and approaching the ones who seem like a good fit.

And grow. Always grow. Never be afraid of working hard, but keep in mind that a lot of that effort has to go into your own writing.

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Jane Lebak is the author of Honest And For True. She has four kids, eleven books in print, two cats, and one husband. She lives in the Swamp and tries to do one scary thing every day. You can like her on Facebook, or visit her at her website at www.janelebak.com.

Keep at it.

She told me the editor made her cry.

This is not a joke, and not an amalgamation-type person, but I'm obfuscating and declarificating her identity because I don't want to identify her. She has a career in publishing now. But she nearly didn't.

She sought out a well known publishing individual at a conference and asked for that person's opinion, and the person told her flat-out that her work was awful and would never get her anywhere, and she should stop. This person told me that she started to cry, and she never wrote again.

I'm writing this post because she's not alone.

Person #2 showed her work to a writer she greatly admired. That writer brushed her off, said her work was amateurish and clumsy, and she shouldn't keep writing.

Person #3 went into a conference and chose her conference track specifically to interact with one individual. That individual couldn't make it at the last minute, so the conference assigned her to someone else, and that individual trashed her work, called it juvenile, said no one reads that kind of stuff, and told her to stop writing.

Are you mad yet? Because I'm mad.

Person #2 kept going and is doing great. Person #3 stopped writing for two years and then one day woke up with a character who demanded to be written. She's now published a series starring that character. Person #1 works in publishing but is not herself a writer. They'll all be okay.

Some people won't be.

If someone has derailed your work, I want you to step back and take a deep breath, and I want you to consider picking it up again. Maybe not that story. Maybe it will be the next story. But you have a voice, and I want to make sure no one silences it. Keep speaking. Keep writing. Advocate for yourself. Learn everything you can.

And keep this in mind: someone who attacks you for not being good enough is saying more about herself than she is about you.

Get up. Keep going. Gird yourself and prepare to work harder.

If you are the person others come to for advice, here's my advice for you: find the good. You don't know how much effort it took this fledgling writer to approach you and ask for help; hold that manuscript like an egg, and breathe gently. Give a few suggestions that are encouragement rather than detraction.

Is the writing stilted? "Keep at it. Sometime, when you're home alone, read it out loud to yourself and listen to your own rhythm. I think that's really going to help your prose sing."

Is the dialogue trite? "Keep at it. When these guys talk to each other, try to step back and make each of them say things in a slightly different way. Try to make it so if you pulled this one line out of the whole book, the reader would still know who was speaking."

Is the idea overdone? "Keep at it. I like this story, but I suspect you could do a lot more with this idea. Try turning it inside-out and maybe questioning some of the things you assume. Throw out your first and second ideas and try the third one instead. Because there's a lot of fertile ground you could cover here, and I'd love to see what you can do with it."

See the thread? Ask for more. When someone is fragile, rather than criticizing, show them how to go for the gold.

Ask them for more. I want to see more depth here. I want to see more time transitioning between scenes. I want to see more description of the surroundings. I want to feel more of what this character is feeling.

Ask for more. You'll get it. We're writers, and we hunger to create. Sometimes we just need better direction and a little guidance for the journey.

The Rites of Feedback

It doesn’t matter where you are in the publication pathway, feedback is something we all deal with in one form or another.

Critique Partners and Groups

This is the essential first step when it comes to feedback. Most often, it takes place with the exchange of material between critique partners or within a group. Often the writer will send a chapter or several chapters to her partner for detailed feedback (including line edits). Some writers attend monthly meetings and read their chapter to the group. The firing squad individuals will then provide constructive criticism. Your goals, writing level (both yours and those providing the feedback), time frame in which you want to finish the story, and how you respond to feedback will determine which method is best for you. Some people thrive on face-to-face feedback. Other people would rather have their teeth extracted without sedation. For them, online feedback is the ideal choice.

When you receive feedback, it’s best that you zip your mouth shut before you say something you’ll regret. You need time to digest the information. You might not agree with the person now, but 24 hours later you might decide they’re the most intelligent person to walk this planet, because they pointed out something you missed. Now, if you didn’t keep your mouth shut and you ranted on about how the individuals are idiots, you might not be invited back to the group. Or worst yet, your poor behavior will become common knowledge.

Contests

Some contests provide feedback via blogs. Other writers, and possibly an agent or editor, do drive-by critiques. Sometimes the agent or editor will request partials and fulls. The feedback can be as simple as ‘Loved this!’ which does nothing to help you improve the piece if it’s lacking. Or it can be more helpful, by pointing out what you excelled at and what left the reader confused. Sometimes it can be misguided in an attempt to make your entry look weak so the judge will select another one—most likely the one belonging to the person who cut yours to pieces. This usually doesn’t have the effect the individual was looking for, but it doesn’t help you, either, if you’re looking for constructive feedback. The other issue that can happen is similar to the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ scenario. One person finds fault with something (that might not even be a real problem), and everyone jumps on it and echoes the same sentiment. This is often the result of lazy critiquing. The writers involved in the contest have to critique five to ten other entries, and this is the easiest way to do it with minimum effort.

The best thing to do with contests is say nothing when you get feedback. And please don’t waste your time justifying why you did something or waste time answering questions left by an individual (which were most likely rhetorical anyway). You will only come off as defensive. Take what you need from the feedback and ignore everything else. Do, though, pay attention to what the industry expert says. I’ve seen agents love an excerpt that everyone tore apart. Trust what the expert has to say.

Querying

Yes, querying, the word so many writers dread—and for good reason. Unfortunately, there are a lot of writers who believe querying is a fancy word for feedback. But alas, this is not so. These days you’re lucky if you even get a form rejection. The benefit of this is you now know your  query or requested material wasn’t lost in cyberspace. Sometimes an agent or editor will reject your material, but with a kindly worded explanation as to why the story or writing didn’t work for them. Remember, it is subjective. Just because one agent didn’t connect with your characters, it doesn’t mean you need to rewrite the book. However, if your query or requested material continues to be rejected because agents and editors didn’t connect with your characters, that is a warning you need to do some serious rethinking about your characters, your story, and possibly your writing.

No matter how the agent or editor responds to your query, DO NOT email back and tell her that she is a moron for not seeing how brilliant your book is and how you will be the next JK Rowling. I can guarantee that won’t change her mind. And if you keep harassing her with your tirades, news will get around to other agents and editors. I don’t think I need to spell out what that potentially means to your career.

Reviews

After all the feedback and rejections you’ve dealt with along the way, your skin might be a little thicker, but the ultimate test comes now, once your book is published. Your baby has been released into the world, but that doesn’t mean everyone is going to love it. There will be people who dislike your book because they don’t like your trope, they don’t like your characters, they don’t like that your heroine’s favorite color is indigo. But that’s okay because you haven’t love every book you’ve read, right? Now, there will be people who thrive on cutting books down and thrive on calling authors names that should never be spoken in public. No one knows why these people are bullies, and it doesn’t matter the reason. The main thing is you IGNORE THEM. Never feed the trolls. And while you’re at it, don’t let your friends and family feed them, either. The trolls could retaliate, and you’ll be the victim not them.

And it’s not just the trolls you need to ignore. It’s best for everyone concern that you don’t respond to reviews, especially when you don’t agree with them. Remember, reviews aren’t for the author; they’re for the reader. Let readers do their thing, and you do yours—writing the next book.

Where are you on the ‘rites of feedback’ pathway?

Stina Lindenblatt @StinaLL writes Young Adult and New Adult novels. In her spare time, she’s a photographer and can be found at her blog/website.   She is represented by Marisa Corvisiero, and finds it weird talking about herself in third person. Her debut New Adult contemporary romance TELL ME WHEN (Carina Press, HQN) is now available.

 

Feeding And Feedback

"I wanted you to like me, and I thought the best way to do that was with brilliant and insightful critique."  This is how I introduced myself during the first session at a local critique group. "But in order to do that, I'd have to be brilliant. So instead I made cookies."

Not my original idea, to be fair. I ganked that quote from my English 201 TA, who baked for the few students who attended on the day before Thanksgiving too many years ago to count. I recommend his strategy because it works.

For the second month I attended my critique group, I thought about bringing cookies again. I like baking for other people. I also like eating the things I bake, making it a win-win. But the second month, my Patient Husband said, "If you bake for them this month, they'll expect it every month."

I repeated that on Twitter, and someone replied, "Newsflash: they already expect you to do it every month."

The day before the writing group, I did bake some awesome oatmeal-cinnamon chip cookies, but my youngest child stood on a chair to watch and managed to break the sugar bowl on the stove-top. I threw away two dozen unbaked cookies on the grounds that no one would like Glass-Shard Chip Cookies. After that, I wouldn't have had enough, so I didn't bring any.

For the third session, I considered brownies.

Then I realized, I'm getting critiqued. Does that change things?

I liked (and still like) this group a lot. There's insightful critique; it's well-organized and everyone has an equal chance to participate. The group leader runs a tight-but-not-strangulation-tight ship. What worried me was that showing up with cookies (or brownies or pumpkin muffins) might undercut the other members' negative comments about my manuscript because they might not want to hurt the feelings of the baker. 

Above all, I didn't want them to hold back. In my opinion, hitting a manuscript with honest punches only makes it stronger.

It's overthinking, sure, but is it justified? Critique is useless when it's only positive. Saying that a piece's dialogue works well but omitting that the main character is loathsome (for example) doesn't help the writer, who needs to know those things in order to improve.

A friend of mine tweeted a great idea:

But somehow...oh, I don't know.

Over the years, I've found that the best way to induce insightful critique is more of a pre-emptive strategy than a reactive one. That is to say, I look for writers whose opinions I value and whose work I like, and I try to cultivate a critique-for-critique relationship. I'm no longer the jerk who sends a five-page unsolicited letter critiquing/praising/dissecting a 10-page fanfic (although I made one of my best friends that way) but I've found that when you ask someone to swap critiques, and then you spend about twenty minutes per page critiquing their work and compiling a significant edit letter, you get back about what you've given. (Not always, but if you're selective, it pays off often enough to make it worthwhile.)

Cookies are good, in other words, but most writers want something better to feed on. They want your honesty.

Not all writers -- and you do have to be careful. I also earned one lifelong enemy by saying "I find your tone to be uneven" (and immediately heard back that she'd expected such narrow-minded and judgmental responses from the unenlightened who were too stupid to understand her work. I apologized for being dim and never touched her work again, but she still hated me ten years later.) Sometimes a writer says "honest feedback" but means "unrestrained praise," and it's difficult to tell at first who those writers are. 

It's very important to give feedback at the level the writer needs -- and a writer needs first and foremost to be able to hear what you're saying. Sometimes that means not saying "Your main character is loathsome" but rather "I really like the dialogue, but sometimes I couldn't get as close as I wanted to your main character." Sometimes it means just focusing on the things that work until the writer is ready to hear more. 

Is that dishonest? Or is that like my son's karate instructor, a fifth-degree black belt, not punching my child into the back wall of the dojo just because he could?

That's not what I wanted, though. I wanted it brutal and honest. If the manuscript had to bleed, let it bleed cleanly. If my main character was loathsome, I wanted to hear "Your main character is loathsome no matter how snappy her dialogue."

So I stood at my oven, questioning: would sweet snacks and their empty calories lead to sweet commentary with equally empty suggestions? 

The urge to write versus the urge to bake. Who would win? And in the end, I didn't bring anything to that session either. 

PS: Nowadays, now that I can trust them to tell me where I'm failing, and now that they trust me not to go weep in the corner, I don't hesitate to bring any snacks I want. Because I enjoy both the feeding and the feedback.

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Jane Lebak is the author of The Wrong Enemy. She has four kids, three cats, two books in print, and one husband. She lives in the Swamp and spends her time either writing books or baking pumpkin muffins. At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four kids. If you want to make her rich and famous, please contact the riveting Roseanne Wells of the Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency.

Reality doesn't have to make sense

I cannot tell you how often in critique group I've had or heard the following conversation:

Critiquer: This section felt a bit unbelievable.
Writer: But it really happened that way!

Or else:

Professor: I found this section unrealistic in its portrayal of police operations.
Writer: But it could happen that way! I spoke to a retired cop once and he said it.

The list of excuses is endless: I saw a news report that... I read a study that... My great-aunt said that... This is based on a man who did almost exactly the same thing!

Honestly? It doesn't matter.

Back in 2010, I came across a news story about a toddler who was ejected from his mother's car during a rollover crash. He was shot into the air over a twenty-foot sound barrier along the edge of the highway and into the back yard of two volunteers for the police department, who were trained to handle emergencies and just happened to be home at the time.

(If you're wondering, the mother was arrested on charges of child neglect because she didn't have a license and there were no car seats in the vehicle.)

My Patient Husband's remark was, "If that appeared in a story, no one would believe it."

No, as a writer, you couldn't do that. Well, maybe in a story about a guardian angel who was told by God to have fifteen of his friends over for a touch-football game, and between plays they noticed the car rolling over, and because they were angels they lifted the child twenty feet into the air to clear the wall, and then they went back in time to ensure two law enforcement officers bought that particular house and would be home to help the kid. You could swing it in Doctor Who, also. 

In a regular story, no. In  non-speculative fiction, it's best to go with the regular way of doing things even if the other way could theoretically happen, or is based on something that probably happened, or even if it did actually happen. 

In fiction, "it actually happened that way" means nothing. You're not going to be standing there with your reader saying, "No, it really happened!" Nor will you be including footnotes to news articles courtesy of the Wayback Machine. 

If you break the fictive dream with your reader, the social contract has been ruptured. The reader no longer feels like believing you because you as an author are unreliable.

Not the narrator (unreliable narrators are fun) but you the author.

Those little trustworthy moments add up to trusting you on the big ones. A friend of mine set an action-adventure SF novel in a series of caves. The overall story involved FTL travel, alien races, telepathic animals, and a bomb that could destroy a planet. Quite a lot to suspend your disbelief for, right? But her caving details were so dead-on-target-accurate that the whole setup was believable. (She got fan mail asking where she did her caving.)

If on the other hand the everyday details don't add up, the reader won't believe the big scene and the big situation and the big stakes you're setting up. And why risk that? Because something cool actually happened? But it's not reality. It's a work of fiction.

Yes, fiction has higher standards than reality. One of my writing professors used to reply, dead-pan, that in reality, a man in a clown suit may walk into the room, hit you in the face with a pie, and leave never to be seen again. But that's not something you want to put into your novel.

If something happens one way 99% of the time, it doesn't matter if it happens another way that other percent: do it the 99% way or you risk alienating all your readers who think, "No, I know that's not how it works." Or else prepare us far in advance for that 1%. Fold it into the story so that when the really odd thing emerges, we already know it's possible.

I'm glad reality rules and that the child in the news survived his brief flight. But children need car seats, and fiction needs to make sense.


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Check out fellow QT blogger Ash Krafton's Fall Into Fantasy giveaway -- fifty fantasy and paranormal titles up for grabs! And one of them is mine.
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Jane Lebak is the author of The Wrong Enemy. She has four kids, three cats, two books in print, and one husband. She lives in the Swamp and spends her time either writing books or swatting mosquitos. At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four kids. If you want to make her rich and famous, please contact the riveting Roseanne Wells of the Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency.