On Tuesday the
Writing Excuses Retreat was in Labadee, Haiti, a private port owned
by Royal Carribean. I’m not a beach or snorkeling fan, so I stayed
on the ship to prepare for my critique session on Thursday.
Before the trip,
Mary Robinette Kowal pointed us to a vlog entry she made back in June about how to critique. The basic idea
is that the first stage of critiquing, which we beginners were to
stick to, is to report “symptoms” you encounter while reading.
You report places you really liked (so that, in fixing problems, the
writer doesn’t accidentally “fix” good stuff), then places that
threw you out of the story: things you didn’t believe, things you
didn’t understand, and things you didn’t care about. The vlog
explains all this better than I could, along with the next stages:
diagnosis, and prescription. For the critique sessions on the cruise,
only the instructor was allowed to diagnose or prescribe.
So I spent much of
the morning reading the submissions of the other five writers in my
session, and trying to critique according to Mary’s guidelines. I
found it fairly difficult to find much to say, and was a little
discouraged, but figured I’m a beginner at this and should go easy
on myself. It turned out I made a reasonable contribution to the
session two days later.
Wednesday involved a
trip to a plantation near Falmouth, Jamaica, which I may write about
later.
On Thursday
afternoon, the six of us met with Mary. We went around the table
clockwise from Mary’s left. Each critiquer reported their symptoms,
with a maximum of two minutes each. Mary always went last, and had as
much time as she wanted. The writer remains silent to the end, and
even then isn’t allowed to explain anything – but they’re
allowed to ask questions for clarification, including “if I’d
done this would that have
fixed your problem?” which is a bit of an encroachment on the
prescription side but was allowed anyway.
The
group was really positive, even when reporting problems. I’d been
nervous going in, but the supportive attitude towards the people who
came before me calmed my nervousness before it was my turn. I’d
submitted an edited version of the first chapter from my 2006
NaNoWriMo novel. They said
several very positive things about parts of it, including
some phrases or sentences I hadn’t especially planned out to evoke
the kind of reaction they had to it. They
then reported
several things that confused them, most of which seemed easily fixed
to me (in fact I asked a question about whether a particular 1-word
fix would have eliminated a major confusion, and they agreed it would
have). There was one longish passage that was important to me that
they thought dragged on too long; it’s one where I wanted to convey
something about the emotions the PoV character was experiencing, but
that didn’t come across well. Mary suggested I could try some of
the ideas Delia Sherman had talked about on Monday for revealing a
character’s emotional state while, on the surface, giving
descriptions like the ones in that problematic
passage. But
I might have to just cut it out, or move it later in the book, or
shorten it, all of which I’m resisting.
They
said my monster wasn’t creepy enough. Maybe I need to read some
horror novels for inspiration. One of them had a really
creepy encounter in their submission; I clearly have a bunch to learn
in that aspect of my writing.
I
learned a lot from the
critiques people gave on the other extracts. Next time I critique
something, I can make a better contribution.
At
the end a few of us exchanged email addresses and agreed to critique
each others’ work in the future. I’ve been told several times by
established authors that having a good group of beta readers is what
a beginner needs to take things to the next level, and remains
essential for experienced writers. I think the (mild) pressure to
submit something to the group every so often is going to be
invaluable in getting me to spend more time on my writing.
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