Category Archives: Critique Group

Loving Revisions

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I’ve been hip deep in revisions for a few months now. For me, this is one of the best parts of writing. Striking through words, sentences and even paragraphs.

Going through WH is hard enough. I’ve been working on this story for almost ten years now. I can’t even see the mistakes, typos, or leaps in logic that need to be fixed. That’s why I decided to start with this one with the critique group. I needed line edits, not because I thought it was done, but because I couldn’t see what needed editing. Doing the actual revision has taught me a few things.

1. Someone needs to look at this.

I cannot tell you how invaluable critiquing is for a story to work. Without another set of eyes, you can miss typos, get your facts wrong and totally screw up the plot. As a writer, you starting filling in details you know but many have never actually wrote down. The only cure for this is for another set of eyes to look at your work. Even after revisions get some folks to read it all the way through, in case you missed something.

2. Music

Having something to listen to other than people, Muzak, or construction is imperative. I have a battle mix I save just for writing. It contains fast songs with upbeat messages. Whatever your tastes are you will want to have some way to drown out the noise you don’t want. This gets you into the zone while writing and revising.

3. Love your revisions

Change is for the better and in many cases, your darlings must go. Darlings aren’t just for ly words. They are also first chapters, phrases, characters, mannerisms, actions, scenes and endings. If you love it and no one else does, kill it. Everyone’s darlings are different. I’ll have a post on my own darlings when I get through this revisions. Write down what you get rid of, because you’ll want to check future stories for these same problem children.

Revisions are unavoidable. Whether you need one or twenty, you have to commit to making the best story you can. The only way to do that, is through revision.

Redemption and evolution in writing

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I read on Facebook an article someone posted about The Mount of Olives Cemetery being desecrated in Jerusalem. Then I read the vitriolic comments against any and every Muslim everywhere in the world. Both the content of the article, and the comments were profoundly distressing, because it seems we keep going around and around and around, mired in both ancient and recent hatreds. I had the usual barrage of emotions and lamentations, ‘When will this end?’, ‘Never. It’s been going on for thousands of years. It’ll never change.’, ‘Why can’t we get along with our neighbors?’ Nothing of what I was thinking hadn’t been thought a million times before by millions of people.

My next thought may not have been original but it was sobering. I remembered this: “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”–Carl Sagan

As it has in the past, this commencement address made me cry, in a way that news articles usually don’t, however disturbing. When I finished sniffling into my box of tissues, I realized that the reason it always makes me cry is because for me, it contains what Ray Bradbury referred to in Something Wicked This Way Comes as ‘the sound truth makes being said’.

I have struggled with the concept of organized religion my whole life, at once fascinated and resistant, despite my upbringing as an Ashenazic Jew. What I found in my exposure to religion was not God, but the many faces of humanity: our need for ritual, our inventiveness, our impressive capacity for resilience and hope, compassion and empathy, and also our nearly unimaginable capacity for cruelty and malice. The anthropological world has analyzed myths and argued about the faces of the gods and demons being the faces of man, in every possible incarnation. I agree. But like other humans, I need more than that conclusion.  I guess that when I read stories, I’m searching for our creation of God, for something that will show me the better side of our natures. Most of the stories I write have an overriding theme in which monsters evolve into something better than they were when they started. Not all of them. Some of them cater to my love of horror, the monsters in my own closet. But my favorite stories to read and write are about redemption and evolution, not in the eyes of an anthropomorphic or even nebulous god of organized religion, but toward our own survival as a species, as Carl Sagan specified, the individual adoption of compassion and empathy that will ultimately allow us to continue on the pale blue dot. It is the evidence of individual evolution in the faces of my fellow creatures, whether that evolution is physical, psychological, or emotional, that shows me more than any book or doctrine could, the evidence of a great and ordered, or even a divine force.

Are you a fishist?

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You started out a good writer, and your critique partners are part of a process that made you even better. You’ve worked hard, and listened to what that phenomenal group of readers and commenters has to say, and you can really see a difference between the stuff you wrote pre-group and the stuff you write now. This is working. It really is. You’re getting better.

In fact, you just might be the best one in the group. Secretly, you’ve always harbored the belief that you could be. That sneaking suspicion has grown into the belief that you ARE. You’re the best in the group. Oh, you’re not going to gloat or be smug, and you’re still giving 110% when it’s your turn to write a critique. So it’s not like that.

That’s a good thing, right? You’re the most likely to get published. The one who can give the best advice – delivered tactfully, of course – to the others. You get respect and approval, and everybody loves your work, and critique after critique says “I can’t find much to complain about here.” You’re the biggest fish in that pond.

Careful.

It FEELS like a good thing to be the biggest fish in your pond. It’s something you could get used to. It’s comforting, and comfortable, and the accolades are nice. That feeling of being helpful, and of teaching others, and of genuinely assisting up and coming writers to become better… those feelings are pretty great.

But it’s not good news.

That process of improvement, of fresh air let into your work through the puncture holes, of critiques that make you gnash your teeth a few times before you pay attention – that uncomfortable, damnable feeling of having things to learn – remember? That process has just stopped.

Once you’re the big fish, it’s dangerously easy to be seduced into thinking that you’ve stopped growing because there’s no more room to grow. A writer can’t afford to become complacent and self-important. We have enough ego already – yes, expressed just as often in breast-beating and despair as it is in self-congratulation and smug assistance to others, but it’s still ego.

In my critique group, I’m far from the biggest fish. I’m blessed with several other writers who knock my socks off. I’m further blessed with writers who are better than I am at different things – I can learn about plotting from one person, story structure from another, method from another.

Best of all, I’m blessed with wonderful writers who frequently disagree with me. Often I have to go home and sleep on their words before I can shut my ego up enough to listen, but whether I end up changing my ways or not, their viewpoints are always valuable. I couldn’t ask for a better group of readers.

If you’ve become the victim of fishism – if you’re splashing in a pond that doesn’t have any room left for growing – consider flooding yourself with new ideas, new disagreements, new discomforts, and new critique partners. Start that painful learning process again. It’s a big ocean.

The coming Author War

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I believe there will be a war between the writers who want agents and traditional publishers to “take care of them” and indie writers who want to control their own careers. — Dean Wesley Smith

I’ve been worried about this for a while now. I’ve noticed people choosing up sides on blogs and Twitter. Folks like Smith, Konrath, Hocking, Barry Eisler and myself on one side, and traditionally published authors like Lilith Saintcrow and Maureen Johnson on the other. One side wants, even needs, publishing to change so we can control our own destinies and write whatever we want. The other side needs publishing to remain the same, or at least stable, because that’s how they feed their families. They’re invested in the status quo.

So far, both sides are getting along, agreeing to disagree. But this tolerance is starting to slip. Debates are getting more heated. But it’s starting to look more and more like familiar political structures, taking on the flavor of unions versus freelancers. I fear that like American politics, the two sides will diverge to the point where they can no longer talk to each other, no longer respect each other’s point of view.

Barry Eisler’s defection to the indie side has shaken a lot of people in traditional publishing. When a New York Times Bestselling author walks away from a half million dollar advance to go indie, it makes indie publishing real. We’re not the lunatic fringe anymore. We’re the competition. The disruptors. The heretics.

Not that it’s all smiles and bunnies in the indie camp, either. There is dissension in the ranks. While some indie authors race to the bottom to sell their books at 99 cents before they lose their competitive price advantage, others decry how 99 cents “devalues” the book as an art form and demand their peers price their books higher, lest readers get too accustomed to paying a buck a book. I suspect this argument will settle out when the 99 centers figure out that they can’t sustain that price, and that their market dries up too fast. But I hope we get it ironed out before traditional publishers, along with the authors that depend on them, mobilize against the threat indie publishing poses.

Indie publishing isn’t for everyone

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I keep seeing news articles about Amanda Hocking, and they’re all careful to point out that her experience isn’t representative of indie publishing in general. Even Hocking herself doesn’t understand why writers she believes to be better than her don’t sell as well. A lot of it comes down to luck.

I’m getting a chance to look at the indie publishing experience through a different set of eyes, and I’m coming to realize it takes an unusual collection of skills, as well. My friend Rachel is gearing up to publish several of her short stories and her first novel on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Lulu, etc. Let me get this out of the way. Rachel is a superwoman. She’s a better writer than me, she is good at just about everything she does and she and her husband have resumes that make you think they’re genetic mutants, superspies, or both. But Rachel doesn’t know much about indie publishing yet (she’ll be an expert soon, I bet), and by watching what she’s going through, it’s showing me why I think this indie thing is so easy. It isn’t. It just looks that way to me because of an accidental education.

Here’s some of what you need to know, besides the actual writing, to do well at indie publishing.

Editing

On the editing thing, I know what I don’t know and have hired an excellent editor whose opinions I trust to help me out with that aspect. But it took me a long time as a writer to realize what people meant when they said I “needed an editor.”

The real value of a professional editor, freelance or otherwise, isn’t in finding typos and subject/verb agreement. That’s a copyeditor, and while you need one of those too, and sometimes they’ll be the same person as your content editor, that’s not what a content editor does. Your editor is there to sanity check your choices as a writer and make sure the story is as good as you can make it. The telling of the story is important, but if the story itself has giant holes or inconsistencies, it doesn’t matter how beautifully it might be told.

Kathleen provides this for me. She checks to see if the story really makes sense, if this character would really do that, and points out where I really need to rethink that three page monologue (hint: anywhere you have one). She’s not changing the story, or putting her stamp on it. She’s helping me make it what I wanted it to be in the first place.

This is extraordinarily difficult to do by yourself. You’re too close to the story to really question the fundamental choices you made when you wrote it. That’s why if you’re going indie, it’s a worthwhile investment to find an editor you can trust and pay them what they’re worth.

Graphic design

Like it or not, people do just a book by its cover, especially online. Your cover is the first thing, along with the title, that a potential reader sees, and how it looks tells them a lot about you as a professional. If the cover looks attractive, with solid design, good typography and imagery, that tells them that they can probably expect that same attention to detail in the text. An weak cover, something that looks slapped together in five minutes in MS Paint, can drive readers right past your book. Remember, this isn’t the old days when people took what they could get. Entertainment in the 21st century is a marketplace of abundance, and you’re not only competing against both the other indie authors and the big NY publishers, but you’re also competing for your readers’ time with Call of Duty, Netflix, Angry Birds and who knows what else.

Here I really lucked out. Not only do I have a background in graphic arts myself, but my editor Kathleen designs book covers as a hobby and offers that as part of her editing service. She’s really good, and I’m going with her covers for Revelation and Crusade, along with one of my own for Jihad.

Book design

This is something I picked up partly by hobby, partly by accident. I’ve been making ebooks for years, both my own work and converting downloaded scans or conversions into properly formatted ebooks for my own collection. I’m an old hand with eReader’s old PML markup, and I watched the XHTML-based Open Ebook Format develop from the very beginning.

More to the point, I’m a (recovering) professional web developer, and a pretentious one that jumped on the “separate content from presentation” CSS train early on. I’m the type that uses styles in Word for everything, and never just italicizes a word ad hoc (that’s what the “emphasis” style is there for).

For modern ebooks, design returns to the web of ten years ago, keeping things simple and using basic structural tags. Converting text to very basic HTML is second nature to me, as is cleaning up a manuscript to get rid of anything that isn’t supposed to be there. I know regular expressions, dammit, and I’m not afraid to use them. I didn’t set out learn these techniques to format my own ebooks for publication, exactly, but they sure come in handy now.

This means I can format my books quickly and easily to what Amazon, Barnes&Noble, etc want when it comes time to upload. Speaking of which…

Content management systems

Anyone who has a blog should be right at home with the content management systems behind the bookstores at major ebooksellers. Web based forms are easy. Right? Not necessarily. Rachel’s having trouble getting her first Kindle ebook out of  ”publishing” status. It keeps reverting to “draft” and no one seems to know why. I haven’t had the chance yet to look it over myself, and I might not be able to figure it out, but I didn’t have any trouble getting “Do Over!” through the system. Why? Because I’m a blogger and former developer, and I’m already comfortable working on the web.

Marketing and promotion

In the middle of the 2000s, I spend several years in various sales positions. Retail, cold calling, the whole nine yards. I learned I don’t like hard selling, but I also learned a lot about why people buy what they do, what kind of enticements are effective in getting people to try something new. I wouldn’t consider myself an expert by any means, but I’m comfortable handling this aspect of indie publishing myself. I’ve already got lots of ideas on pricing, promotion, cross marketing, bundling, stuff most authors never think they’ll have to think about.

Social networking

And lastly, I know how to get by with a little help from my friends. A few years back, I’d vaguely heard of Facebook and there was some tweeter thing Silicon Valley insiders were using. Now, if you don’t have a presence on Twitter and Facebook, you may as well not exist. Gone are the days of a writer sitting alone in a shack, sending out his novels and never interacting with his fans directly. Now, you’re expected to be present. You’re expected to engage. Answer questions. Being able to actually talk to my favorite authors on Twitter is amazing, and I’m looking forward to getting into discussions with my fans.

I welcome every aspect of being an indie author, but that’s because my eclectic education and career path has given me the tools to do so. I know I’m atypical. So if you’re thinking about going this route, ask yourself if you’re ready to do all the different things you have to do well to pull this off.