After doing this for as long as I have, I’ve come to the conclusion that nearly all writers have a point in their process where their story is fragile. It’s a different point for every writer, and sometimes different stories become brittle at different points, unexpectedly. A
Read more →The holiday season is always a bit tricky when it comes to blog posts. I generally take the week off between Christmas and New Years, so next week will be another Open Mic, available for whatever people want to discuss (or just for exchanging holiday wishes). I’ll
Read more →Every so often, I get asked about finding beta readers. This is my take: Step 1: Decide what you want from a beta reader. Some writers want (and need) encouragement—the proverbial “five pages of closely reasoned praise.” Other writers want something specific; they want to know if
Read more →The community here has done a bang-up job of making suggestions for finding a writing group in last week’s Open Mic comments, but I’m going to add my two cents here. It’s been a while since I talked about writing groups. And the first thing I have
Read more →Generally speaking, pre-publication critical comments fall into two broad groups: reader reactions (“I started skimming right here.” “This whole section confused me.”) and specific suggestions (“Have ninjas leap through the window!” “I think you should cut the grandmother character.”) Both require some thought, but along different lines.
Read more →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
Read more →Different writers get different things “for free” – that is, different techniques and skills come naturally to different writers. I learned this early on, but it took years before I realized that I needed to apply that knowledge to more than my own first draft, and years
Read more →A while back, I was talking to an Earnest Young Writer, who informed me with great intensity that the story she was writing had a Theme, and that she couldn’t do anything about certain objections she was getting from her beta readers because that would destroy what
Read more →So LizV wants to know how to find critiquers in the first place, rightly noting that the last post I did has more to do with how you deal with them once you have them lined up. The short answer is, you ask people. The longer answer…
Read more →That last post of comments segues nicely into this one, which is about critiquing and being critiqued. Good critique is hard to find. There are several reasons for this, starting with the fact that “good critique” means different things to different people. Some folks want the proverbial
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