Eric wrote —

“I have taken criticism, however, from editors, after an article or story or book has been sold. That sort of criticism I can handle because the editor has already said that he or she likes the writing by buying it and is only aiming to make it better.”

Yes, the best critic is the one willing to pay for someone’s writing, and who knows their audience the best.

One reason critiques of my technical writing didn’t bother me was payment. I got paid for every minute of the time I spent, before and after the critiques. It’s not that I must make a living at fiction to survive, but there’s no threat in a critique if you know your work isn’t all for nothing and you’ll still get paid. The unpaid critique poses a challenge with no promise of success, whether you follow the suggestions or not. I’ve invested a lot of my life in this work already. If I must use my judgment to pick and choose which suggestions to follow, and still have no guarantee of a sale, then why not use my own best judgment to begin with, without the bother of a critique?

“As for the other critiques — aside from my other misgivings, I would, as you say, be confused. Everyone has their own way of doing things.”

That is the source of some of my confusion. Other writers sometimes project how they would write the story. I do the same when I critique, at least inside my head. But other writers shouldn’t write their stories to fit my vision, and when I seek a critique, I’m not looking for ideas. I already have more ideas than I can use. I want to know what’s working and what isn’t. It’s difficult, in a critique, to separate what doesn’t work from what merely doesn’t work for that critique-giver, or in that incomplete excerpt of a novel. So, again, I wind up using my own judgment.

Judy B — You made very good points, and still I’m afraid I find myself disagreeing with a lot of what you said, as it applies to where I am with my writing. They’re worthy thoughts nonetheless for any aspiring writer to heed.

“Maybe if you think of your writing as a vessel for your self/heart/soul/emotions, rather than actually yourself, you will approach critiques differently.”

But aren’t my self/heart/soul/emotions all me? I think I see where you’re going with that, but it does nothing to control my emotions regarding the time and energy I’ve put in as a writer, and the fact that it is in essence wasted if it finds no audience besides fellow writers critiquing my work. They’re not who I write for. I think a certain amount of my emotional response to critiques these days is frustration, rather than any sense of being wounded by criticism. What good does this do, after a point?

“Actors and dancers can actually say they are their art—their bodies are the medium of the work—but the rest of us employ some physical object as a conveyance of our expressions. And I think we can all take a lesson from actors, dancers, and visual artists and musicians in both giving and accepting criticism.”

Funny, I started out wanting to imagine an example applying the critique process to a painter in the midst of creating a painting, which, I think, would be tantamount to creative suicide. But they really aren’t the same things.

I also think I am my art. It’s an extension of me. I have no problem with the criticism that takes place in formal training, workshops, formal editing, or reviews of published work, because I want my work to be its best. Once actors and dancers finish their formal training they either get work or, eventually, find something else to do. I suspect that when a writer has been working at improving for a long time, but the work isn’t selling, it’s just not marketable. No amount of critiquing will save it. Writers sometimes beat our dead horses to a pulp and don’t know when to move on.

“The goal of criticism should be to make the work stronger, not to weaken the artist. Strong writing communicates. Weak writing draws attention to itself.”

I agree, and good critiques point out the strengths in the work as well as suggest fixes for weaknesses. I’ve had some terrific critiques in the past that did exactly that. I’m not knocking critiques, as a whole, but questioning their usefulness in the continued writing process. They have their place, but I don’t think that’s necessarily as a permanent fixture in a writer’s process — at least not in mine.

“To return to the theater remark, a director is constantly critiquing her actors—telling them when a tone of voice, a gesture, a look, is untrue to the character or misrepresents the intention of the story.”

Once a director is involved, the actor is employed. How does having my manuscript critiqued by another unpublished novelist equate to that? I’m better off submitting to contests. By the way, the most helpful and insightful critique I ever received was from a judge in a contest, and I don’t mind an editor who buys my work critiquing it. I’ll welcome that.

“I think because the act of writing is solitary, we are removed from the kind of critique that is an inherent component of creating performance art.”

Are we, if we educate ourselves and keep learning, if those early critiques teach us how to critique our own work, and if we listen to editors who buy our work? I think for some of us the beauty in writing is that it’s solitary. I know that’s a strong draw for me.

“But we do ourselves—and our readers—a favor by learning to accept and give thoughtful criticism. We make the work stronger and the experience of the work more enjoyable.”

I agree that the critique process, early on, helps us learn to be better judges of our work. But we get that in any good creative writing workshop or continuing education program in writing. A thorough critique of a novel is time-consuming, though. There’s a point beyond which we need to work on our own, or with the editors who pick up our work. For minor occasional errors, typos, and unclear passages, a careful proofreading or copy edit of the finished manuscript prior to submission, preferably by another pair of eyes than the writer’s, is more valuable than a critique from a peer.

Susan —

“Yes, you need feedback and so must develop a crusty shell–if nothing else, it will prepare you for the publishing world.”

The secret I’m discovering is that you don’t have to develop a crusty shell, that it isn’t even desirable. The best stories exhibit sensitivity to what people feel and experience, and that takes a thin skin in a writer, in fact a lot of empathy and honesty about one’s own feelings. A healthy amount of perfectionism is also necessary in order to become a better writer, and that’s part of what’s involved in our bad reactions to critiques. We want to be better writers and not make errors. If we didn’t want that, we wouldn’t care about critiques. If we let ourselves get too crusty, we’re in danger of becoming hacks. Remaining just unsure enough of myself that I take another critical look — and another — instead of sending too early a draft off is a good thing, if I don’t carry it so far that I never finish anything.

“Many workshopping groups like to rewrite your story as they want to see it. These you consider and if it doesn’t suit your plot, scrap. Others are nitpicky about what they’ve learned in writing classes and taken as written in stone, i.e., action in the opening page, conflict, immediate plot, etc. They’re used to writing what they’ve been reading and mimicking that style as the sacred rule. These too, you forget about.”

I’ve had similar experiences. When I factor in the number of really good suggestions or caught mistakes in recent years, they don’t justify the time involved.

Here’s the clincher for me: There were many times in my group when someone read something that was so good I thought they should be submitting it rather than reading it to us. A good half of the members were good enough writers that, looking back, I don’t think they needed a group. They needed to write and submit, and let an editor help them polish and tweak. Why were they there? Had they submitted and been rejected? If so, that was likely due to reasons other than the quality of their writing. I’m not such a prolific writer that I have that kind of time to spare, and I’m not exactly a kid anymore.

“So my suggestion is to get involved with either a good group or just a few friends that enjoy reading, some preferably wise about the ways of writing, and this will serve the purpose of general audience appeal as well as professional input.”

Good points. I would add, if after serious education or self-education one feels the need for a group at all.

Time is a big factor for me with critique groups. I belonged to a good group during the early stages of this book, met some great local writers, and got helpful critiques. I don’t regret any of that. But I had the story critiqued too early, and those critiques have been rendered almost useless by subsequent revisions. We provided a lot of help to members with short stories, but when I did the math I realized none of us would get an entire novel critiqued quickly enough to suit me. I’ve heard of groups that work better for novelists, by taking a different approach, reading entire manuscripts on members’ own time and only discussing them in meetings. But it’s still a big investment of time, and it’s tricky to get just the right mix of people together.

There were other problems. Sometimes the comments I received would’ve stripped my story of its conflict, which led me to think some members didn’t understand conflict. The varying degrees of knowledge in a group can be problematic, and that would’ve been a great opportunity to just talk for a while about conflict, but it wasn’t part of our set process, and we were always strapped for time. Because we only covered one chapter at a time, the others couldn’t always see the value in foreshadowing or other elements that would become more important later in the story. A novel needs a novel-length critique. Chapter-by-chapter critiques don’t help evaluate a novel as a whole, and sometimes don’t help at all in the early drafts.

Groups seem to be the latest big thing these days, for writers, and I suspect the big push toward getting critiques and joining groups comes as a result of the beginners who decide to write novels on whims, and don’t bother to learn craft or even read other novels. Read enough of their work as an editor or agent, and you’ll want to urge any writer who might submit to you to improve their skills. The POD self-publishing phenomenon has increased this a thousand-fold. I’m sure that beginning writers do benefit from workshops and critique groups, because I did. Every creative writing class or workshop I ever took involved some form of critique, for a good reason. But I also benefited from studying story structure and other elements of fiction on my own, from reading a lot of fiction, and especially from writing a lot. Once we’ve learned the basics and our writing has matured, most writers work best alone, without a lot of outside voices pressing for our attention.

Mind you, I don’t go completely without a review of my work. I know from my years in technical writing that another pair of eyes is necessary to get a manuscript ready to submit. I have someone who does basic checking for errors and typos, as well as conflict, suspense, pace, and passages that aren’t clear. He does this from the perspective of an interested party who isn’t a fiction writer. He’s nit-picky, and not afraid to point out problems. But that’s it, for now, until someone buys the story or an agent chooses to represent it.

Again, I want to thank you all for your comments, because you’ve helped me think this through and sort out my feelings about critiques.

On a lighter note, I often wish form rejections at least offered hope where hope was warranted, and perhaps discouraged the utterly hopeless — put them out of their misery once and for all so they could take up speed walking or jelly making, or something else productive. So I’ve written my own form. (It’s a joke, so please, no comments about me being cruel.)

Dear editor, if you decide against publishing my work and don’t have time to explain why, please check one of the following and return it in my SASE:

1. Wow. You almost got in, but I only have so much time, so consider this a detailed rejection without the details, and I hope you try us again.

2. I almost wrote a detailed rejection, but your work wasn’t quite that good. Join a good workshop and keep learning, because you’re a young voice worth nurturing — that is, if you’re young, or a beginner. If you’ve been at this for twenty years and still write this way, then you need to get a new hobby, or new form of personal torture, or whatever you prefer to call it.

3. Maybe you should keep writing. Just don’t send your work here. We publish science fiction, not romance, no matter how much weird science is involved, and I’m not sure that contaminated birth control pills resulting in multiple births of space-alien love children qualifies as science. Check our guidelines. If you make this stupid mistake again, we will charge you for the time it takes us to tear open your submission and toss it in the can along with your SASE. By the way, my name is spelled Smythie, not Smythe. You should at least bother to spell my peculiar name correctly, even though you’ve never met me and submit to hundreds of editors a year. How dare you. I mean really. And I’m the short story editor, not the novel excerpt editor. You should know that, even though we switch jobs regularly and forget to update the website. Idiot!

4. Don’t quit your day job, ever. Seriously, maybe someone should confiscate your computer. Please do the publishing world a favor and find a new hobby, or sadistic method of torturing hapless editors, or whatever you prefer to call it.

Maybe I got carried away.

In closing, I know there are rank beginners who muddy the slush piles with amateur work. Too many, obviously, if we now need to have agents submit for us in order to get past the slush piles at publishing houses. Meanwhile some good unpublished writers are perfectionists who haven’t gotten enough of the positive attention they deserve for their work, so they don’t think their work is good enough yet, so they’re stuck in critique groups needlessly going over their work again and again. Maybe, and this is a scary thought, maybe there are too many writers in ratio to readers. Maybe that’s because the big publishing houses are putting too much of their money into a few guaranteed bestsellers instead of taking more risks and backing more fresh voices.

Novelists are taking a lot of risks. We can’t deduct our biggest expense — unpaid time — years of it. Eric mentioned in his blog the other day that most fiction writers would jump at minimum wage pay. It’s true. Maybe reading is falling off because readers walk into a chain store and see a wall packed with hundreds of copies of the same hit title and think there’s nothing else to read, so they go to the movies, watch TV, or play a video game instead. All those book-a-year and two-book-a-year contracts have authors pumping out work, but perhaps not the work they feel most passionate about.

Hype numbs the consumer, and hyper-productivity numbs the writer. Maybe that’s what’s happening in the world of books.

I loved to read, as a girl and a young adult. I still do, but I often wish I could read the same way I did back then. Once you’ve been a writer, editor, or proofreader (and I’ve been all of those), it becomes nearly impossible to just read, without editing or analyzing or noticing parts of speech. I can barely make it through almost anyone else’s writing anymore without wanting to stop and edit, or at least correct a typo here and there, or think about some aspect of it besides the story being told, the information or advice being relayed. Plot structure, characterization. Wondering why the author did that, or admiring a description rather than staying in the story.

It’s even worse with my own writing. No matter how many times I’ve been through it, no matter how good anyone else thinks it is, I find it impossible to just read what I’ve written. I’ve heard that near the end of his life Ernest Hemmingway could barely compose a single sentence, he’d become such a perfectionist about his writing. But, I wonder, how was he at reading? That’s the thing that kills me.

It’s a mad dance with myself, trying to read this book. But I hope that as I read through this draft, if I can distance myself enough from it, I’ll see it more the way other readers will. I also hope to come to a final decision about a title for this book. Finally I hope to see the big picture of the story, and notice any gaping flaws or errors in logic, rather than the little nit-picky things I’ll focus on the final time through.

I’m in the second category. I’m a wordy writer, and it frustrates me to see how many extra words I write. If I’d been able to keep my words in check, the story surely wouldn’t have taken so long to come together. Or would it? Why this need to expand so much on what can be said with so many less words?

Authors who write about writing sometimes tell us a writer trains himself eventually how to write to word count. I’ve found I can do this with non-fiction, but fiction is another creature altogether. It’s all in the editing phase for me, or should I say the cutting phase. That’s where I am now, at the end of the third draft, embarking on the endless cutting phase.

It’s a matter of getting to the right words, the way a sculptor chips away at stone or wood to get to the form inside. Some people do more of the chipping away of words in their heads, in advance. I spill mine onto the page. I write and write and find when I’m done that there’s some good stuff there hidden among lots of other stuff that I have to sort through, sweep away, and haul off to the word dump in truckloads.

I wonder about the similarity of the words “mind” and “mine.” Is my mind a not so rich mine, containing too much useless ore to be sifted through? Have I never really hit the mother lode in there? Is the creative vein too thin, is there too much tailing left behind to be worth all this effort?

Do you write long or short? Do you trim away or build up content in your edits?

I started my website back in 2000, when Shadows Fall was first published, for the same reason most writers do, to promote my work. Four years later I started this blog as a way to provide up-to-date content on my website and let visitors know what I was working on—basically as a way to keep the website from stagnating when too much time passed between novels. Little did I know at the time that the blog would engage so much of my attention.

The immediacy of this format holds a certain attraction. Type, click a button, and what you’ve written is published. But that has its drawbacks. As easy as email, which carries its own risks, a blog can suck you out into public view in a way that’s scary and in some ways deceiving. It’s easy to forget you’re putting yourself “out there” to the degree we do online. After all, I’m seated here alone at my home computer as I type this into a little window on my screen. It doesn’t feel public at all, at the time I write.

I tend to be more reticent when I’m face to face with people. As a private person—in fact an introvert—I find the public aspect of blogging conflicts with those personal, internal privacy constraints. The degree of narcisim that comes into play in me when I engage in this blog or others startles me, especially after the fact, if I go back and read what I’ve said. I’ve always kept a journal, so I grew accustomed, years ago, to exploring and sorting out my thoughts by writing them down. But that used to be strictly private. Anything that might be published went through heavy editing and self-censoring. It had time to simmer, to boil down, before it left my hands and confronted other readers. Even then, I sometimes felt overexposed when submitting work. I’ve come to realize this mental exploration through words can come across in blogging and commenting as total self-absorption. At least that’s how I see it. I find myself talking about me, me, me, in a way I rarely do in real life, and then only with a select few people. I’m not sure I like doing this online. It’s a little too much of me, if you ask me.

Maybe blogging and commenting is too easy, too instant, too uninhibited—and far too permanent once it’s out there. Effective, judicious communication requires more time, more thought, more self-editing than this. I feel a need to take a step back. I’m not this spontaneous a person.

Then again, maybe getting me out of my native reticence is a good thing. The business end of writing requires that one put oneself out in the world in a way that’s uncomfortable to many of us who tend to be introverts. Writing is the form of communication we’re most comfortable with, so blog as conversation is a handy tool for us to use.

There’s a teaching attributed sometimes to Sufism, and other times to Socrates as the Triple Filter Test. It states that one shouldn’t speak until one’s words have passed through three gates or filters: truth, necessity, and kindness. Still, the questions linger in my mind, especially recently. So much of the rest of my life draws me, calls to me. I find I’m leaving the blog sit for long periods of time. I’m building dreams in the physical world that I want to pour my energy and time into.

Is all this blogging I do really necessary? Does it serve a purpose—the right purpose? If it’s all just so much babble about me or my life or my opinions, why do it at all? And what about my comments elsewhere? I’m a passionate, opinionated person. I’m an impulsive, temperamental commenter. I flare up over news or politics. I say things on the spur of the moment that I may later regret, because I didn’t think things through, or I wrote out of context to the original post, or I reacted and blurted out my first thought rather than responding from my core. Maybe I erred, or changed my mind. I’m not afraid to admit when I do that, but a comment made on a blog I visit may be around for a long time, while I may forget where it was. I have gone back and edited my posts on my blog at times, sometimes deleted them altogether. But, just as with emails, when we don’t know who they may be forwarded to, we lose control of comments.

Now this is not to say I intend to give up blogging—or commenting. I don’t. But recently I want to give all this more thought, take it a little slower. Is my attitude about this suddenly too furtive, too cautious? Am I dithering?

Sometimes I wonder if the next step beyond blogging is for the human race to become more telepathic. Here in the blogosphere we sometimes share our thoughts almost as soon as we think them. They’re not just first draft writing, sometimes they’re first draft thoughts. They spring newborn onto the screen, brain to fingers to blogosphere. Telepathy sometimes seems like the next logical step. If we need to be concerned with those three gates or filters when speaking and writing, perhaps blogging will teach us to engage them when thinking as well, to govern our thoughts, preparing us to wise up before we jump that communicative gap. Or is it possible that our thoughts already carry far more power—or distance—than we realize? Who knows?

So I wonder, why do other people blog, and how do you feel about it?
Have your reasons for doing it changed since you began?
Have you written posts or comments you regretted?
Does blogging accomplish a purpose for you? If so, what?

I’m looking forward to the Winter Olympics, though, and I plan to subject Ken to hours of figure skating on TV.

I was saddened this week to hear of the death of Betty Friedan, and I take comfort that the Mystique lives on. My condolences to those who knew and loved her.

Coretta Scott King will be deeply missed, and I’m heartened by the hope that she and her husband are enjoying a blessed reunion. Their messages and dedication to civil rights made this world an infinitely better place. I hope we can ensure their work continues here without them.

During the past few days I read an excellent post on Mark Coggins’ blog about the Frey fray. I liked Gore Vidal’s State of the Union message better than President Bush’s . I’ll be happy when solar power is available inexpensively to anyone who needs it (thanks Dave Pollard for those two links), and I’m glad I don’t live and drive in Kakadu, Australia, where the salties have taken to flying into cars. But then I guess anywhere you choose to live you’re bound to face the danger of some kind of natural disaster. If it isn’t hurricanes, volcanoes, or earthquakes, it’s flying supersized crocodiles.

Speaking of hurricanes, a synchronous event took place in the blogosphere when three of my favorite bloggers mentioned things in their posts that also occur in my current mystery. Reenie’s Reach compared a person to a hurricane, Jason at Wildhunt mentioned a woman who wears a pentagram in a coffee shop (only the woman in my mystery is there to read Tarot, not serve coffee), and Eric Mayer wrote about his male cat with a feminine name. I mention this because I don’t want you guys to think I’m swiping ideas from your blogs for my story. I won’t go into the details of those bits of my novel, because then you’d have less reason to read the book. I’m just saying—are you telepathic or something?

How does the emotional factor compare with my earlier mysteries? Shadows Fall was intensely emotional, since it dealt with Beth Gray’s PTSD and related phobia, as well as her dramatic family interactions. That was a different kind of story. It’s been called psychological suspense by some, and I think it tips in that direction. This story doesn’t go that far into psychological drama, but there’s a strong people element, as well as romance, and these characters have their histories, which to a great extent drive them to do the things they do, for good or ill. Instead of psychology, here I’m exploring one area of parapsychology—or at least paranormal experience. Nothing creepy or horrific about it, but I hope it will intrigue all the same.

If by emotion you mean romance, there is romance in this story. We’ll see how it stacks up. When I wrote Shadows Fall, I was listening to a lot of love songs—so maybe some of the credit goes to them and their ability to affect my mood. However, this is a series, so romance is trickier to deal with. In a standalone mystery with a romance you can get to a happily-ever-after scene and not worry about what to do with the romantic element in later books.

No characters have been carried over from my other books. I’ll do that again with more stories set in the Sierras. Shadows Fall and Snow Angels took place in sparsely populated towns in imaginary Wilder County in the Sierra Nevada, so it seemed natural to have some of the same characters show up—Sheriff Lester Kendall, his deputy Duane Prescott, and Peter Lloyd. This story, which I’m frustrated to say doesn’t yet have a working title, takes place on the Redwood Coast. Again, in an imaginary town. Costa Sequoia is larger than Wilder or Cedar Creek, though it retains a small town atmosphere, as many of our mid-sized coastal towns do. In the future, who knows? They all live in California. Anything could happen.

Writing this story has made me itch to take a trip up the coast, even though I know Costa Sequoia doesn’t exist there, exactly. I miss it. Of course I’ll get to visit during the editing phase, but that’s not the same as the kind of living-in-the-story we do while we write. But I’ll be back—if the series sells—and maybe next time I’ll get to spend more time in the woods, or by the ocean.

I have a few trusted readers who’ll go through the manuscript for me, but I’ll likely do at least one more major edit before then, with lots of trimming down to size. It feels great to have a whole story instead of chopped up bits, though, and a real ending instead of what I thought I wanted to call an ending in the first draft.

Point of view (POV) can be a bugaboo or a blessing. I enjoyed exploring the two POV characters in this novel. If Snow Angels had one weakness, other than being a backward-derivative (long story, for another post) of Shadows Fall, it was characterization. At least I see it that way, even if others don’t, which is why I’ve given it away as a free ebook.

I have some future stories for this series planned, in which I look forward to writing still more points of view. One I’m going to enjoy writing a lot is that of Iris Somerset’s sixteen-year-old half-brother, who’s only mentioned in the current book. Where do these characters come from? Are they inside of us? Are they composites of people we’ve known? Are we channeling? They become so real, it just amazes me sometimes.

Where I am now: I’m writing a scene-by-scene summary to help me with the big cuts and edits. I also have to come up with a title. When I titled Shadows Fall I had no idea there was a band by that name—in fact maybe there wasn’t yet when I first thought of the title. I wanted it to be unique, and learned it wasn’t at all, after publication, and that bothered me. So, although I know a publisher may re-title the book, I plan to spend some time ruminating over the working title I’ll use to submit this one.

With the trouble I have making decisions, it’s amazing I get anything done.

Some of the most recent comments here were disrupted by a MySQL database error, so one or two had to be reconstituted. If you made a comment or attempted to during that time, or if a comment you made appears with a different timestamp, my apologies.

I hope everyone is enjoying the gear up toward winter and the holidays. For me it’s refreshing just to have some cooler, moister weather. We were expecting rain tonight, but now it’s looking less likely. That’s how it goes most years. Welcome to Southern California, where we have drought or floods and nothing in between. If it’s not an El Nino year, rain is only a rumor.

The first draft seemed to go great, and I finished it quickly.

It felt a little flat to me. There was a lot more story seeping into my mind, as the original idea developed and morphed over time, than was apparent in that draft. The main problem was the limited viewpoint. After debating with myself for a while, I decided the story needed a second viewpoint character. Actually I have to admit the character himself told me this. Yeah, sounds a little crazy, huh. But this is fiction. He was coming to life, and he wanted a voice.

The character was already there. I just had to make him a viewpoint character, change some scenes that involved him so he could tell a portion of the story from his perspective, reveal some of what he knew.

It sounds so simple.

At first I couldn’t get this guy to come completely to life in my head in quite the way I needed him to, in spite of his nagging desire to do so. I had the idea of him, but not him, if that makes any sense. I had to research the region and slightly different culture he comes from, as well as his profession. I had to understand his childhood and some of the things he went through that motivate him and cause him to keep the secrets he does.

When he finally began to show not just signs of life but a concrete personality, he developed in a hurry, and he started to take over the story. Then I had to work on Iris, because, damn it, this is her series, not his.

That’s where I am now, still adding the punch of this second character’s side of things. I’m almost done. Hopefully the rest of the edits will go much more quickly. Maybe someday I’ll learn to have the whole thing in my head before I start writing. Nah—that’s no fun, knowing where you’re going before you go there? I had enough of that as a technical writer. In the meantime, I’m a bad blogger. I’m in the story, and I want to stay there. Some days I regret that I have to sleep, that’s how caught up I’ve been in my own little world. It sounds pretty sick, if you don’t believe there’s actually going to be a published book that comes out of this.