Monthly Archives: June 2019

June 11, 2019 · 4:55 pm

The Guidelines for Critique

Excerpted from “The guidelines for critique,” author/source unknown—a handout I found while sorting through old notes from writers’ conferences. These are excellent guidelines, well worth sharing. If anyone knows where this material came from originally, please tell me so I can give credit where it’s due.

Critique Group Guidelines

Leave personalities out of it.
Keep it short and to the point.
If you don’t have something to say, don’t say it.
Have something to say.

Personal preferences as to genre have no bearing. If you don’t like a particular genre, chances are you haven’t read enough of it to make an important critical explication. This does not mean, however, that you cannot critique individual elements such as word choice, spelling, and punctuation. If you have a question concerning what genre a story is, ask.

Critique content only if relevant to the saleability or context of the book; e.g., blatant racism is generally unacceptable, and if the book is about a tea party [meaning a pre-21st century tea party], references to fighting in ‘Nam may have no place.

All critique, if valid and dispensed with good intentions, is positive. Even critique which may on its face appear to be negative is positive in that it points toward a goal of solid reconstruction. Praise, while nice, is not truly critique, and is rarely practically useful — keep it very short. “This is good,” springs to mind as a possible time-saver. As a rule, “negative” is more constructive than “positive.”

All critique, if valid and dispensed with good intentions, is positive.

Critique is not debate. As a critic, don’t get into a debate with the writer or another critic concerning any point you may have to make.

Don’t recount anecdotes of your own unless they’re directly and immediately relevant — and short!

Don’t repeat others’ critiques unless it is very important. Saying “I agree with such-and-such” is short and gets the point across nicely. Reiterating what that person said at length is unnecessary, time-consuming, and redundant in the broadest sense of the word.

Don’t contradict another’s critique unless you feel very strongly that it needs contradiction. Remember, it’s up to the writer to make the decision as to what s/he keeps and does not keep. An exception to this guideline is when you feel that another critic has missed the point of the reading or hasn’t a full understanding of genre requirements, or whatever. Sometimes the writer needs to know that his/her point was not missed by everyone.

Don’t ask questions unless you need a specific point of clarification.

Keeping It Short

The following is a list of individual points that critics often get hung up on when they should be looking at the broader scope of the writing. These are valid points. However, too much time may be spent noting specific references at times that might be better spent critiquing the larger, more deadly aspects of the work.

Checklist for critique:

Too many gerundal (-ing) endings
Too many adverbial endings
Too many adjectives
Too much “tell” and not enough “show”
Too slow
Too fast and superficial
Not enough emotion
Touch all the senses, including smell
Too many dialogue tags
Not enough tags
I got lost in the geography of the reading
The following words appeared frequently or in close juxtaposition: __________

(This series continues with Readers Facilitate Valid Critique and Critiquing Common Writing Errors.)

Traditions of Celtic Mythology: How Waterspell Fits

Waterspell fantasy series by Deborah J. Lightfoot. Review: "The world-building was amazing but the characters pulled me in."

A reader and reviewer (she’s also an editor of long experience and impeccable taste) paid me an enormous compliment when she advised her Facebook friends to read my books because “Waterspell is solidly in the class of great epic fantasy (e.g., Tolkien, George R. R. Martin); definitely not namby, trite fantasy, of which there is far too much.”

Humbled to the earth by such praise, I was moved to recall an earlier discussion with an interviewer during the long years I spent researching and writing the Waterspell books. Below are excerpts (the full interview is here).

Q: Does WATERSPELL take its inspiration from Celtic mythology?

A: Broadly and indirectly, yes. When I started reading the early Irish legends and Celtic myths, I was looking mainly for “the telling detail”—authentic figures of speech, colorful descriptive terms, gritty background textures. But as I read, I noticed that aspects of the mythology had their counterparts in this fantasy I was writing. Or vice versa. For instance, water often has mystical qualities in the legends—Irish rivers like the Boyne were held sacred. It’s pretty obvious from the series title—Waterspell—that water has magical properties in my story, too. The traditions tell of quests, leading into the Otherworld and back. “Other worlds” figure prominently in Waterspell: the premise being that what’s harmless in one world or reality may prove deadly if it arrives, whether innocently or by skullduggery, where it doesn’t belong. Also central to my work is the heroic quest, undertaken to gain information or wisdom, to bring healing, or to find or restore lost objects.

I am by no means an expert on Irish legends. Given the huge number of books that have been produced on the subject and the very few of them that I’ve read, I can barely claim a nodding acquaintance. My sole aim, in working into my writings details from the legends, is to make Waterspell “fit” into the world of Celtic mythology the way Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings fits with traditional Scandinavian mythology.

Katharine Briggs said of Tolkien’s work: “The whole was not decorated but deepened by the use of traditional folklore which gave it that sense of being rooted in the earth which is the gift of folklore to literature.” That’s what I’m after: to create a fantasy world that’s rooted deeply in an ancient tradition.

Obviously I’m thrilled to have a reader/reviewer make the connection independently. That tells me I succeeded, at least on some level, in my attempt to pay homage to those great old Irish and Scottish storytellers who are a link to the Celtic mythology that underpins much of the fantasy genre.

Thank you, Shelley! ♥

Awakening Your Stylistic Instinct

From my late friend Ruth Cauble, I inherited a book called COMMON SENSE ABOUT WRITING, by Thomas H. Cain. Its copyright date is 1967, making it a brand-new book when Ruth won it as a prize in a writing competition. She inscribed the flyleaf: “Rec’d for first place award in the Grace Gaylord Creative Writing Contest — June 9, 1967 — R. Sammons Cauble.”
I am endlessly interested in matters of style, so I turned first to chapter 7, titled “Expression: Style and Sentences.” Dr. Cain, who wrote the book when he was an associate professor of English at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, defined style as “the total effect of writing.”
“It is the effect achieved,” he wrote, “by the ideas, the order, the paragraphs, the sentences, and the words all working together harmoniously.”
Cain recognized that a writer’s style is a very personal thing. No two people will write exactly alike, or even agree completely on what constitutes good style:

“The reason may be that when you try to express your ideas in the best words, sentences, and sequences of sentences, a whole army of subjective human variables comes into action: personal factors, individual gifts, range of experience, reading background, discretion, sense of decorum, feeling for rhythm, and plain taste … style springs from just such individual sources.”

Style, then, is partly subconscious: it arises from a writer’s way of thinking. But by reading widely and intensively, we can sharpen our stylistic instincts.

We’ve all heard the advice to read widely in the genre in which we wish to write: memoir, literary fiction, speculative fiction, etc. According to Alan Cheuse, author of novels, short fiction, and memoir:

“You can’t write seriously without reading the greats in that peculiar way that writers read, attentive to the particularities of the language, to the technical turns and twists of scene-making and plot, soaking up numerous narrative strategies and studying various approaches to that cave in the deep woods where the human heart hibernates.”

To help you read in the writer’s “peculiar” focused way, Dr. Cain suggested this exercise:

From a book you especially admire, choose a passage of about 12 or 15 sentences. Read the passage silently.
Note the structure of each paragraph.
Read the passage aloud, listening to the stages in the paragraph structure and especially to the rhythm of the sentences and how they vary in length and emphasis.
Now copy the passage slowly by hand (don’t type), sentence by sentence, first reading each sentence aloud and noting its pattern of emphasis and rhythm.
Copy the entire passage again (typing it if you wish), listening for the way the sentences work together in groups of two or three.

“By the time you reach Step 5,” Cain predicted, “you will find that you have almost memorized the rhythm and scheme of emphasis in some sentences, even though you can’t quite repeat the words. This is enough. The whole point of the exercise lies in sensing when sentences sound right. It marks the awakening of the stylistic instinct that guides most professional writers as they write.”

I did this exercise with one of my favorite books, The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. In analyzing a page chosen at random from near the middle of the story, I noted unusual similes, questions presented in groups of three (employing “the power of three”), specific and colorful word choices, strongly rhythmic phrasing, and the use of the conjunction “and” to create both a driving rhythm and a smooth flow. On just that one page, I identified and studied a wide range of the techniques that contribute to Pullman’s powerful and pleasing style.

Dr. Cain suggested doing the exercise one hour a day for a week or two. This kind of intensive reading isn’t a replacement for an extensive reading background, but it can be a useful crash course in developing your stylistic instinct.

(Thank you, Ruth Ann. I love the book.)

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Filed under Books and Readers, On Writing, Writers

Tagged as writing advice

June 5, 2019 · 11:45 am

Frugality With Adverbs and Adjectives: Doing More With Less

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs,” said Stephen King in his excellent book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

When I first tried my hand at fiction, it took me a while to understand that adverbs and adjectives are methods of telling, not showing. Oh, I’d been warned away from adverbs since high school or before. In my writing I’ve always favored strong verbs over weak-verb-plus-adverb combinations: “race” or “sprint” is stronger than “run quickly.”

But as I made the transition from nonfiction and began writing novels, I somehow got it into my head that unusual or quirky adjectives would add layers of meaning and color to my nouns. I wasted time digging through thesauri and even crossword puzzle dictionaries looking for nifty adjectives that writers before me had seldom dared to use:

rubicund, benignant, recondite, brumous …

Well, maybe not those exactly, but you get the idea. For a while I was pleased with myself for taking the time to find exactly the right adjective to describe to the nth degree precisely what I wanted the reader to know about any given noun.

Then it came time to read my fiction aloud. Thank heavens I read my drafts out loud to myself before taking them to my critique group. Scritch, scritch, scritch — my red pen stayed busy striking through all those distracting, unnecessary adjectives.

The experience taught me that nouns and verbs show, but adjectives and adverbs tell. In any sentence, it’s preferable to use a solid, precise noun and a vigorous, precise verb. Tack on the modifiers only if they’re really, truly needed.

Don’t write: “The cat, predominantly white with red and black patches, snuck up on the green and gray bird.”

Write: “The calico stalked the parakeet.”

Noah Lukeman devotes chapter 2 of The First Five Pages (Fireside, 2000) to adjectives and adverbs. Lukeman says: “Most people who come to writing for the first time think they bring their nouns and verbs to life by piling on adjectives and adverbs, that by describing a day as being ‘hot, dry, bright and dusty’ they make it more vivid. Almost always the opposite is true … Adjectives and adverbs often, ironically, weaken their subjects. It is as if the writer were saying to the reader, ‘This noun (or verb) is not strong enough to stand on its own, so I will modify it (or build it up) with a few adjectives (or adverbs).”

Overusing adjectives was a passing phase in my fiction-writing career. Now with every read-through of a manuscript, I’m ruthless about cutting the modifiers. Keeping in mind that “Less is more,” I search for any word, phrase, sentence, or paragraph that I can cut.

“In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.” —Sydney Smith, Lady Holland’s Memoir (1855)

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Filed under On Writing, Writers

Tagged as writing advice

June 3, 2019 · 12:48 pm

I Swear

I’m an information junkie. I’m always collecting it — tearing articles out of magazines (I still subscribe to ink-on-paper magazines); quoting the best bits; passing along items that interest me. Possibly I’m a low-level hoarder.

(Illustration by Corliss Elizabeth Williams for Time)

I’ve kept an article I tore out of the July 15, 2009, TIME magazine: “Why Swearing Is Good for You.” Author Tiffany Sharples says that swearing “can do more than vent frustration: it can actually reduce physical pain.” A study in Britain found that test subjects could endure painfully cold water longer while swearing. Repeating “a curse word of their choice” made the ice water feel less intensely painful.

“In swearing,” said the study’s lead author, “people have an emotional response, and it’s the emotional response that actually triggers the reduction of pain.”

I passed along a copy of that article to a writer friend who often advised his colleagues to “put more cussing” in our stories. He seemed to instinctively appreciate the emotional power of swearing.

Of course, for those who write young-adult fiction, swearwords can be problematical. Some teachers, librarians, and parents frown on including obscenities in stories aimed at teenage (and up) readers.

In my high-YA / crossover fantasy series Waterspell, my deuteragonist (the character taking the part of second importance) swears like a sailor, and my protagonist, Carin, can almost match him. Their swearing habits are essential to revealing who these characters are.

To get around the objections that would be raised if I used standard American profanity, I gave my characters a different divinity to swear by. They are in a parallel universe, so it makes sense that their holy figures would have different names than the gods do on Earth. Instead of swearing “by God!” it’s “by Drisha!” in their world.

Another helpful source of inoffensive profanity comes from old English expressions like “gorblimey,” which is a euphemism for “God blind me.” My wizard is fond of saying “Drisha blind me!” It makes people wince in his world, since it’s such a strong oath to them. But Earthlings are not offended.

In my never-ending quest for good, pain-relieving swearing, I mine sources such as old Irish fairy and folk tales. From them I’ve gotten such gems as “A thousand murders!” and “My breath and blood!”

Thanks to TIME’s Tiffany Sharples for giving me even more reasons to collect the best in profanity. My characters get into painful situations that require them to vent via a good outburst of colorful language.