The Art of Critique

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Arizela

When I was first starting out as a serious writer*, I belonged to a critique forum, a writer’s chat site, and an online writer’s workshop. I’ve gotten critiques helpful and weak, gushing and downright rude. I’ve given critiques that pretty much spanned that range, as well, although I did reserve the not-quite-but-almost-rude for the one that was an obvious plagiarism posted to a forum that specifically disallowed such things.

Over the first couple of years, the writer’s forum closed, the chat site filled up with people from all over the world whom I still consider to be friends, and the writer’s workshop became so much work that I couldn’t keep up. Between my full-time schooling and full-time job and full-time mom/wife status… well, writing was on the back burner and critiquing was tossed in a cabinet, out of sight and out of mind. What little time I did get to spend doing what I wanted to do was spent writing. I pretty much stopped even reading.

In the years since, I’ve come to realize what a major impact that period of isolation had on my writing. The effects have been good and bad – good in that it allowed me to develop a real ear for my own voice and the voices of my characters; bad in that I found my creativity beginning to stagnate. The ideas I had for “new” stories weren’t much different from the “old” ones. My writing improved by leaps and bounds, because I had finally latched on to that elusive voice, but it also stopped improving in other ways.

I wouldn’t go back and do it differently. I firmly believe that writing is the best way to learn how to write. But there’s definitely something to be said for being read, and for reading and critically analyzing the writings of others. There’s something to be said for reading widely and voraciously, and for dividing time between expending creative energy and recharging the creative well.

Critiquing is pretty easy when you’re first starting out. You learn a new trick every time you pick something up, it seems, and the new tricks are exciting to pass on. It’s easy to find stuff to critique that is either comparable or better in quality than what you write, and those are the things you learn the most from, as a critiquer. As a person receiving a critique, of course, you learn the most from people who write comparable or better quality fiction than your own, and from reader responses (which are invaluable, imo).

There comes a point at which it’s hard to find a balance – to provide genuine value to the author receiving the critique and also get something out of it for yourself. I was running up against this unkind truth when I left my workshop in 2008 to focus on my nursing career and my family and Hunters. I felt like I wasn’t getting enough out of the workshop experience to justify the time I took to participate. I enjoyed the workshop, but I simply didn’t have enough time left over after all my obligations to participate in something that gave me such a low return for my time investment.

Now that I’m no longer working or going to school, a lot of time has opened up in my life. I want to restore that balance for my creative side – reading more, critiquing others, being critiqued… things I’ve neglected for too long, perhaps. With that in mind, I rejoined my old workshop from 2008. I’m not sure yet whether the difficulty in finding things to critique that teach me as well as the author will continue, but I’m ready to give it another try.

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*meaning I put my butt in the chair and actually wrote as often as I could, rather than just penning a few words here or there when I was too bored to do anything else

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The work goes on

Posted on July 29, 2010 by Arizela

I’m writing again, with a big sigh of relief. Actually, I’m rewriting my second novel – it was what grabbed my creative energy and when coming off a low point I don’t quibble with the muse. I am off my previous heart medication, so my brain is actually firing on all cylinders again, and I’ve finally nabbed the idea that is going to turn that train wreck of a novel into something fantastic – maybe.

You never know. Sometimes what seems like an epiphany turns out to be nothing more than a sneaky way for your brain to derail the story. In any case, I’m getting words… lots of words.

All because I realized that I picked the wrong character as the main protagonist. The real story lies with the previous protag’s mother, who has engineered her life and the lives of her children to resurrect a dead god and restore her world’s dying magic. The daughter was really just a pawn through most of the story, even when she rebelled, and that made the whole thing seem… unsatisfying. We’ll see if the plot holds together with the focus shifted a little to the side.

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The Problem with “Write What You Know”

Posted on July 22, 2010 by Arizela

I watched a TED talk recently by a rather well-known author who has an amazing personal story. (If you don’t know what a TED talk is, look it up. You’re missing some awesome stuff.)

Elif Shafak grew up as a young Muslim woman in Turkey, presented both with modern feminism and traditional medicines and superstition. She was put on trial just a couple of years ago by her homeland for the words and actions of her fictional characters. She’s been writing fiction most of her life, and has been criticized for choosing to step outside of the identity that she has been labeled with as a Muslim woman author to write about people who are… not Muslim women.

I think Ms. Shafak makes a very profound statement toward the end of her talk about the old adage “write what you know”. She proposes that we should forget about writing what we know and instead, write what we feel. Our identity tag should not limit the reaches of our imaginations.

Her proposition is an invitation to explore points of view, cultures, and identities that are not our own. In today’s world, people are classified in a lot of ways, but in fiction we have the ability to transcend those classifications and labels. We have the ability to empathize and portray people who are not carbon copies of ourselves, and in turn give our readers a glimpse into those other points of view as well.

In fiction, my voice can give life to old women and gay men, to warriors and scholars and priests of fantastic religions. I can incorporate my own knowledge and wisdom into these fictional folks. I can research to give them a more authentic point of view and experience. But in the end, I can never really “know” what it’s like to be a man or a shaman or a lizard-creature. What is important, I think, is that I connect with these characters on an emotional level, bringing them to life so that my readers can connect with them as well.

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Do you step outside your identity box when you write? How so?

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Oops, there it is

Posted on July 17, 2010 by Arizela

Yesterday, from late afternoon through the evening, I managed to hammer out a couple of world-building concepts for a new story. Considering that I’d been struggling for three days to try to come up with something cohesive enough to call an idea, this was great progress. I thought to myself, maybe my memory issues from the medications aren’t so bad that they’ll cost me the writing.

At about midnight, my darling hubby and I were heading off to bed, and I glanced at my pill box, to make sure I didn’t have any more antibiotics to take (twice a day, those). Turns out my morning meds, which included my bisoprolol for the heart problem, were still in the box. Oops.

I didn’t intentionally skip a dose. One of the problems with having an unreliable memory is that sometimes you just forget to do stuff – like take meds. It’s kind of interesting though, that my memory/concentration issues improved despite me genuinely having no knowledge that I’d missed a dose. No placebo/nocebo effect there.

You can probably imagine how difficult it was for me to take those meds, after experiencing a glimmer of my former sharp-mindedness. I knew exactly what effect I was causing when I put them in my mouth and swallowed.

My heart took away a lot of things in my life, but I never felt like it took away the core characteristics that made me who I am. No matter that I couldn’t walk fast anymore or do the nursing work I loved. No matter that I couldn’t drive a car or walk through the grocery store without someone along-side who knew what to do if I started looking/feeling bad. Those were just activities. They weren’t ME.

The bisoprolol has made my heart a little better. I can tolerate a little more. My heart rate is only 120-130 at the top of the steps these days, rather than 140-170. My episodes tend to only happen if I over-do it (still pretty easy to do) or if I am exposed to psychological stress (or smart-ass pizza delivery people). But I’m not sure it’s worth the trade. What good does it do to fix my body if in the process I give up the parts of my mind that make me who I am? My memory, my ability to concentrate and finish tasks, my creativity… these things are more precious to me than physical endurance.

I’m not the sort to stop a medication for non-life threatening side effects until I’ve spoken with my doctor about it, so I’ll wait until I see my cardiologist again at the end of the month. I’m not even sure if there are any options, honestly. We’ve tried just about everything, and bisoprolol has been the only medication I’ve tolerated longer than a month or so. Guess I’ll wait and see if the doc has any ideas.

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Wonderous Words

Posted on July 16, 2010 by Arizela

Way back when I first started writing, I used to belong to an online critique and writing group* that would hold these crazy contests a few times a year.

BIAW – “Book in a Week” was my favorite. It involved picking a target number of manuscript formatted pages to complete each day for a week – be it 1 or 50. I wrote my second completed novel draft using their BIAW model, once with the group (I wrote ~50k words in 7 days), and two weeks later, once on my own with my group mates cheering me on anyway. The novel capped out at 105k words, written in two non-consecutive weeks of doing nothing but writing. And people think NaNoWriMo** is crazy.

One of the other contests they used to run was SSIAW – short story in a week. Believe it or not, writing a short story in a week (500-10,000 words, completed story with a beginning, middle, and end) can actually be harder than writing a full length novel. Short story forms are much more precise and require a whole different skill set and narrative talent, imo. During SSIAW, you get a list of 5 words, chosen at random, and must include each of the 5 words in your story. SSIAW ran for 4 consecutive weeks.

While I’ve never been a short-storyist (my attempts always read like first chapters), I have in the past found a lot of inspiration from these lists of words. So when I need a little inspiration, I often take myself off to Word of the Day sites and look for unusual words that strike a note with my imagination. I toss those words together in a list of 5-12 words, and make note of the definitions, too. And then I don’t write them in the story. Rather, I use the idea of them as a jump starter for my creative process. They’re story sparks, rather than part of the prose.

So here are a few of the words I am playing with right now, just in case any of you need a bit of inspiration:

  • Apotheosis – elevation to divinity; diefication
  • Sanguine – blood-red or of blood
  • Sinew – tendon, strength, or natural tendon used as cord (as for a bow)
  • Orrery – a mechanical model of the solar system, often with a light source at the center in place of the sun
  • Ponderous – weighty
  • Chicanery – deception by trickery
  • Chatelaine – castellan’s wife
  • Nimbus – halo or aura around a person (as depicted in art)
  • Prevaricate – mislead, hide the truth without direct lying
  • Abrogate – to officially declare something nonexistant (generally from a religious or political authority)

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* The group I belonged to is still up and running, to my knowledge. I’ve actually considered rejoining several times, but the amount of work involved and my other commitments at the time have held me back. If you want to check it out, it’s one of the best online critique groups I’ve come across for newer writers: Other Worlds Writer’s Workshop at http://otherworlds.net

** NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month, an annual event in November hosted by a non-profit organization dedicated to literacy, where tens of thousands of writers get together online and write their asses off to produce a 50k+ word novel. You can read more about it at http://nanowrimo.org

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