LizV said: Learning to judge what feedback to take on board and what to disregard may well be the hardest lesson a writer has to learn. I mostly do it by gut instinct, but sometimes it’s taken me six months to be able to articulate why a certain suggestion wouldn’t work. Hmm, maybe a future blog post on tips and tricks for making that call?
Let me first point out that you don’t actually have to articulate the reasons why some suggestion doesn’t work. You don’t have to justify taking or not taking someone else’s advice, not even to yourself. If you’re an analytical writer, knowing why this suggestion doesn’t work may help you with future decisions, but pinning down the specifics is still unnecessary for this one.
That said, my second point is … a lot of the time, how you judge feedback is a gut decision, especially early on. Experience helps with pinpointing the why, but it doesn’t change the decision.
The biggest difficulty is that you can’t lay down hard-and-fast rules. Knowing that Jane has a bee in her bonnet about childrearing practices may mean that 98% of the time you can ignore it when she objects to the way your main character interacts with his kids … but there’s still that 2% of the time when she’s right. Kenneth’s Ph.D. in Linguistics may mean that he is dependably correct about grammatical errors … but sometimes you want that phrasing anyway, for reasons. The best you can do are a couple of general guidelines, most of which are contradictory. Things like “Go with your gut instinct” vs. “Stop and think about it carefully, even if (or especially if) you instantly hate the idea.”
If it were simple, somebody would already have written a computer program to do it.
So, ground rules. My personal rules-of-thumb go something like this:
- Think carefully about every suggestion and comment; no dismissing anything out of hand, no matter who made the suggestion or how wrong it is. Well, OK, if they want me to put penguins in the Sahara for no good reason, I ignore them. But I asked this person to crit my stuff for a reason, so unless they’re that far off base, I should at least listen.
- Think carefully about every suggestion and comment; no automatic “Yes, of course I’ll go do that at once,” no matter who made the suggestion. Even my most admired and trusted critic can come up with a boneheaded comment now and again.
- No matter how fired up I am by a good crit session, don’t actually start revising for at least a couple of days (exact time varies by writer; experiment and see what works best for you). Give your reactions time to settle. You are encouraged to make notes so you don’t forget stuff.
- No matter how depressed I am by a crit session, sit down and start revising after no more than a week (exact time varies by writer; again, experiment). Don’t let the crit session get too cold.
- Consider the underlying problem that any specific suggestion is attempting to solve (e.g., characters behaving out of character, plugging a plot hole). Is it a big deal to me and/or this particular story, or not? Is there some other fix besides the one suggested? Would improving the setup mean that there’s no need to fix anything in this scene?
- If you cannot see a problem for yourself, don’t try to fix it, no matter how strongly your critiquer argues in favor of the change.
- Have multiple critiquers. If they all agree that X is a problem, you need to change something, though not necessarily the thing they’re pointing at. Again, consider the underlying problem before changing anything. If everybody thinks something different is wrong with a particular scene, either there’s something fundamentally off that they haven’t gotten at yet, or else the scene needs to be cut.
- If the suggestion is totally off-the-wall, look at what you did that made your critiquer think that this would work in your story. Unless they’re recommending ninjas jump in through the window; that’s critiquer code for “This scene is dragging; stir it up a little, will you?” They don’t really want you to have ninjas jump in. Usually.
- Trust your gut reaction, but only after you have thought about things for a while (hence #3, above, about not jumping straight into making changes). Sometimes, what you thought was your gut saying “Oh, hell, no; that’s not right” is actually your gut saying “Oh, hell, no; that’s way too much work and I don’t wanna.”
- Be ruthlessly honest with yourself. If you’re resisting because it will be way too much work and you don’t want to, admit it. You don’t have to tell anyone else.
It turns out that I have a few more things to say about comments and crit from the writer’s side of things, so you get another post on the subject next week. I promise it won’t be another long list.
What do you do when you have no critiquers? Or one whose critical abilities are limited?
My WIP is sufficiently ambitious that I doubt I can pull it off; but I’m working on it anyway because if I don’t finish it I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering, “What if?” No one knows about it except my husband.
And my husband reads every chapter in rough draft, but he’s an engineer; he doesn’t know how to judge characterization or description or any of those necessary elements; all he can say is “Yes, that’s moving along; yes, I’d read the next chapter.” This is encouraging, but not very. But I don’t have anyone else to show it to, even if I dared. It’s rather like shouting down a canyon and waiting for an echo that never comes back.
Any suggestions?
Note: I was a Linguistics major, back in the day; I never got my Ph.D., but in any case I would judge someone’s grammar in context. “Standard usage would be X; are you using Y because that’s how your character speaks?” (This would be extra-important if the story is in tight-third.) “Or because it’s 500 years in the future and the language has changed?” (Cf. Hoban’s _Riddley Walker._)
If you are too anxious to dare show your work to anyone, there’s nothing I or anyone else can do for you. You can’t get crit without letting someone see the thing.
If it’s a matter of finding people to show it to – there’s always the Internet. You can put out an open request for volunteer critiquers in forums you’ve been on for a while, where you mostly know them and they know you, or you can email specific people you think would provide useful comments and ask each individual privately. It doesn’t matter whether they’re writers or not; an articulate reader can often give better crit than a writer who hasn’t thought about things much.
I don’t think there’s anyone I could show it to at this point. My social circle has shrunk dramatically, since rec.arts.sf.composition died and rec.arts.sf.written has contracted to a fraction of its former self, and its percentage of trolls has risen. This is the only forum that I read (I do not count the Lord of the Rings Online forums, which are not about writing. 🙂 )
I did ask for comments once (on a different book), from someone whose opinions I value; and she said, “Sure, I’ll be delighted,” and she commented on two chapters and then fell silent. I assume she was busy; I *know* she was busy; she already had a dozen titles to her credit and has published several dozen more since. This makes it harder to ask anywhere.
If/when I finish the thing, I’ll send it to my agent. If he thinks it might sell, he’ll shop it around; if not, he’ll say so and send it back.
I’m in a somewhat similar boat. I’ve had too many cases of people working out their own issues in critique’s clothing (and too many chirping crickets), and it’s very hard for me to shut that noise of out my head when writing future stories. So now I’m extremely leery about whose opinions I ask for — which makes it hard to ask enough people to find the good ones.
None of which is a helpful suggestion, but maybe consolation that it’s not just you?
One member of a critique group I was in wholly failed to benefit from her participation. She had a ways to develop her writing, as everything she submitted for review had problem with sequencing or character motivation or the like. But when members pointed these out to her, she would explain that something had happened off-camera or give the psychological underpinnings for Character A to do what she did to Character B.
And with the explanation, she thought her job was done; she never made any changes. *She* knew her reasons, and to her, that was enough. We could not get it through to her that she had not made these things clear in the manuscript and she would not be there to explain to the reader what was lacking on the page.
Writer’s groups have three basic functions: Socializing, emotional support, and critical commentary. All groups do a bit of each, but all groups also slant heavily in one direction rather than the others. It sounds to me as if your crit group member really wanted a social/support group, and what the rest of you were doing was critical comments. I’ve run into that a time or two, and I generally stop making the effort to point out problems and stick with “I liked that bit and this one made me laugh.” It wastes less of my time and the group’s time.
Oh, that reminds me of when Marion Zimmer Bradley would reject someone’s story on the grounds that something in it didn’t make sense, and the writer would say, “Oh, but you don’t understand, X had to happen because Y.” And she would say, “MAKE me understand.”
(Thanks for tackling my question! I’m chiming in rather late because my home internet’s been out for a week.)
I find it helpful to be able to articulate to myself why something doesn’t work, not only because I learn from it for the future, but also because it helps me quit bashing my head against “This is a perfectly reasonable suggestions, why am I so adamantly opposed to it?” and start looking at what problem the suggestion was meant to solve, and whether there’s something else I should be doing about it.
Also, I like the light-bulb feeling. 😉
It might also be helpful to articulate it to a sufficiently flexible critique group because it might lead the discussion around to a suggestion that would work — though that’s a theory I haven’t had much opportunity to test.
That said, I recognize that if the gut says no, that’s justification enough. It’s just that my gut is usually more up-front about its motives. And figuring out why it’s saying what it’s saying is an integral part of #9, for me.