Category: rules

            Okay, first of two posts this week, as promised…

            So a while back at the LA Writers Coffeehouse we were going to talk about criticism.  All the directions it can come from.  What it’s like from either end. How to put it out there.  How to receive it.  We never got around to it there, so I thought I’d talk about it here.

            Just to be different, though, let’s approach this from the tougher angle, in my opinion.  Giving criticism.

            I know that’s hard to believe—that giving criticism can be the hard part.  I mean, just check out any social media site.  Over the past week or so there’ve been tons of people offering critiques of… y’know, different stories.  Often for free. Usually unasked for.

            And, most of the time, not very good.

            Criticism—actual, constructive criticism—is a bit more than ranting online.  It’s being able to state quantifiable, true, relevant facts about a work.  There are a lot of folks who consider themselves critics who really just… spout their opinions a lot.

            I saw one of these recently.  Directed at me.  Someone had read one of my books, loved the first two thirds, but then it had an “action-packed, nonsense finale” that the reader didn’t like.  Which was a shame, because the rest of the book had been pretty good.

            I’ve talked a bit about this before, one of the first things to learn about giving criticism..  Me liking or not liking something isn’t really criticism.  It’s irrelevant.  That’s just a subjective opinion.

            This can be a tough thing to figure out sometimes.  It took me years to be able to separate my opinions from actual facts and observations about the story I was reading.  There are a lot of books and movies I didn’t like, but I can also acknowledge that doesn’t make them bad.  It just means they’re not for me. 

            So that’s lesson one in offering good criticism. Separating my opinion from actual facts.  Anyone can say “this sucks.”  If I’m trying to offer valid criticism, I need to be the person  who can explain whyit sucks.

            And remember—“I didn’t like it” isn’t a reason.

            This should bring us to the second point about giving criticism.  It should be constructive, not destructive.  The goal isn’t to rip something apart, it’s to explain why and how it can be better.  Yes, sometimes this might mean a couple blunt, harsh truths will need to come out.  But even these don’t need to be designed to make the writer cry for weeks.  If that’s why I offered to critique someone’s work, well… I’m doing this for all the wrong reasons.

            Here’s a good rule of thumb.  I shouldn’t point out problems if I can’t offer some kind of actual solution.  This is also a good way to figure out if this is an opinion-vs.-criticism issue.  It’s tough to change opinions, but if something’s actually wrong, it shouldn’t be hard for me to figure out some way to fix it.

            Keep in mind, this doesn’t have to be a good solution.  My editor—a very high ranking editor at Random House—freely admits he’s great at spotting problems, awful at coming up with solutions.  But he’ll always have an answer whenever I ask about something.

            And I shouldn’t offer these solutions unless the writer specifically asks for them—it’d be rude of me to start explaining how someone else should be writing their story.  I mentioned helping a friend with her travel book a while back, and twice or thrice in the notes I’d point out an issue and say “I have an idea that might help with this—let me know if you’re interested.”

            Which is a great lead in to my third point.  If I’m going to offer criticism, I should know what I’m talking about.  This is a tricky one, because it means a lot more than “I read a book every week” or “I’ve seen every Best Picture winner.”  It especially means more than “I just want to read it early.”

            Being able to offer a good critical analysis means being able to juggle a lot of hats.  I need some actual knowledge and understanding of different structure forms and grammar.  I need to have read more than two or three “how to write a bestseller” books.  It wouldn’t hurt if I’ve sat and thought about this knowledge and absorbed it a bit.

            There’s also an empathy issue here, too.  I’ve mentioned a few times that writers have to have a good sense of empathy—if I can’t put myself in other people’s shoes, I’m going to have a tough time as a storyteller. Same goes for critiquing a story.  I need to be able to see what effect the writer’s going for andbe able to predict how people are going to react to it.  If I can’t do this, my whole critique is going to collapse.
            And that brings us to the fourthand final point.  This one’s going to sound obvious.  If someone’s going to trust me with their work, if I’m going to tell them I’ll critique it… I should.  They’re asking for feedback and I should make an honest effort to give it to them.  There’s few things more frustrating for a writer than waiting weeks for feedback and getting a one line email that says “Yeah, I liked it.  It was fun.”

            You may laugh but…  I’ve had beta-readers do that.  Which is why they’re not beta-reading for me anymore.

            Likewise, comments that are too vague to help… don’t really help.  I shouldn’t be writing things like “I saw a couple typos—you’ll probably catch them next time through.”  Again, if I’m doing a critique, I should be noting all this stuff.  Getting caught up in it isn’t an excuse—I’m not supposed to be reading this for fun.  I should take my time and do it right.  As the man says (paraphrased), treat them the way you’d want to be treated.

            Now, with all that said… here’s two positive things about giving criticism.

            Oneis that it doesn’t need to be stiff. Unless I’ve been hired as a professional, I’m reading/critiquing for somebody I know.  Possibly someone I even consider a friend.  I can have fun with this.  It can be conversational.  It can be funny/snarky/flirty whatever.  I don’t need to change my relationship with someone to offer them criticism.  They want it from me, not from Professor Huffy von Formalnotes.

            Twois that… well, I don’t have to read it all.  No, I don’t.  Really. I’m not getting paid, I’m not doing this as part of a formal submission… I don’t need to read all 815 pages. 

            At least three or four times I’ve read books for friends who wanted feedback and forty or fifty pages in it was clear there were… inherent issues.  Things that weren’t going to change.  Things that were going to kill the book’s chances if an editor or agent read those first fifty pages. So I stopped there.  I gave them all the notes I’d made up to that point, and then explained the bigger problems I was seeing.  And that was it. My time is valuable—and so’s theirs.  They don’t need to read twenty pages of notes from me repeating the same things over and over and over again.

            And again.

            There you have it.  Some tips to giving better criticism.  Maybe even a few tips about dealing with it if you read around the edges a bit (and follow some of the links).

            Next time… well, we’re closing in on the holidays, and after all this criticism we could probably talk about some good stuff, yes?

            Until then, go write.

            I’m off at San Diego Comic Con all week, doing all sorts of stuff, but I still wanted to have something here (I’m assuming not all of you are going to be at SDCC with me).  So I figured I’d roll out something I’ve been saving for a special occasion…
            A few years back, a story artist at Pixar named Emma Coats took all the various tips and hints and suggestions she’d heard during her time there and boiled them down to 22 rules.  I’ve seen them presented a few different ways over the years (including a free poster available on Pixar’s website), but this particular one struck a chord with me—somebody memed them.

            (And I’m ashamed to say I don’t know who.  I first ran into them on a website, but an image search just turned up… a lot of websites.  So if anyone can figure out who actually deserves credit, please let me know…)
            If you happen to be at SDCC, please find me somewhere and say “hi.”

            I’m relatively new to Twitter.  I mean, I’ve been there a couple years now, but there are some early-adopters who’ve been there for ten years or more.  I remember a while back when Ernie Cline finally got verified, and he noted that he’d been on Twitter longer than the Twitter verified account…

            Anyway, I follow a lot of writers, and most of them (and me, too) tend to toss out storytelling advice of one kind or another.  As best you can in 140 characters, anyway.  Sometimes it’s threads, random encouragements, simple reminders—there’s all sorts of stuff.

            Of course, like any statement made on Twitter, this advice is often followed by a response like “Well, actually…”  You’ve probably seen it applied to a lot of things beyond just writing advice

            In simple terms, this kind of response is people pointing to an exception to the rule in an attempt to disprove the rule.  And a lot of the time, they’re doing this to justify their own opinions and behaviors.  I don’t like statement X, or what it implies, so I’ll find one or two examples where X isn’t true and use it as proof that X is never true.

            Here’s the thing about approaching writing—or anything in life—with that kind of mindset.

            Vesna Vulovic.

            For those of you who came in late, Vesna was a flight attendant back in the early ‘70s.  I’ve mentioned her here once or thrice before, and a few times at the Coffeehouse.  Y’see, her DC-9 was bombed in mid-air back in 1972.  She was trapped inside the plane’s hull as it plunged six miles to the ground. 

            However…

            Somehow, through a near miraculous series of events and conditions, Vesna survived.  She fell 33,000 feet, was in the hospital for a couple of months afterwards, and left under her own power.  No wheelchairs.  No artificial limbs. No iron plates in the skull.  She was fine.  They did a whole Mythbusters episode about her fall.

            Vesna lived a very full, rich life for another forty-four years, just passing on back in December.  She ended up working as a political activist for most of her life. And she still holds the Guinness Record for an uncontrolled fall.
            So… this means one of my characters can fall six miles and live, right?  It really happened, so it must be believable.  Heck, I could probably say they fell a mile without even needing hospital time.

            Let’s be clear on one thing—there are always exceptions to the rule.  Always.  Anyone who tells you that something is 100%, never-question-it always wrong–especially in art–can be ignored.  Especially if they shriek “no exceptions!!”

            Here’s the catch. Exceptions to the rule are very rare.  Exceptionally rare, you could say.  That’s why they’re the exception to the rule and not the rule. 

            For example, maybe I can point to a dozen people who sold the first draft of the first novel they wrote.  But I can also point to the tens of millions of people—actual, literal millions—whose first draft submissions were rejected. 
            Yeah, there’s a double handful of authors who sold manuscript full-to-the-brim with horrible spelling and bad grammar and not the slightest clue about formatting.  There are hundreds of phone books full of people, though, whose manuscripts were tossed out almost immediately because of these same issues.

            And sure, we can point at a dozen or so people who got their first book sold because they knew the right people or were related to the right people or were sleeping with the right people. But there are also the hundreds of thousands, probably (again) millions of writers who broke in by taking their time and writing really good books.

            The downside of this is… well, none of us want to be in the majority, right? Nobody likes the thought of eventually breaking in, we want all the success and recognition now!  We want to be the exception!

            And, yeah, some folks have gambled everything on being the exception. That’s their entire business plan. I don’t want to take the time or do the work or try improving myself and my skills.  So I’ll latch onto anything that says I don’t have to, anything that proves the advice from that experienced pro is wrong.

            Okay. Fine. Just ask yourself one question…

            D’you want to go skydiving without a parachute?

            I’m willing to bet a fairly large-denomination bill that right now someone is itching to write a “well, actually…” down below that will explain how this isn’t the same thing.  Or that you can go skydiving without a chute. Or that there are two or three schools of thought that Ms. Vulovic maybe didn’t fall quite as far as all the reports said.  It’s just human nature. Some people need to argue the way you and I need to breathe.

            Even if it amounts to arguing against parachutes when you go skydiving.

            When professional writers offer advice, they’re handing out parachutes.

            So, here’s my bit of advice for you, and it’s one I hope you’ve seen underlying most of the stuff I’ve said here since the first post you may have read.

            Y’see, Timmy, the best thing I can do is assume I’m not the exception to the rule.  No matter how clever, how witty, how perfect my writing is, I should not consider myself to be the one person who gets to ignore all the established standards.  The absolute worst thing I can do is scoff at the rules and think they don’t apply to me.  No matter how vastly superior my work is, I should always assume I’m working under the same conditions as everyone else.

            The reason I should assume this is because the person readingmy work is going to assume it.  That’s what I’m fighting against when I plan on being the exception to the rule.  My audience—whether it’s an editor, and agent, or just someone reading my story for free on their Kindle or on Wattpad.  All these folks have seen attempts to break the rules again and again and again, and the overwhelming majority of these attempts have been simply awful. 

            Remember—exceptions are rare.  Very rare.  The vast majority of would-be writers who break the rules do it for the wrong reasons and in the wrong ways.  So when I veer away from the rules, most everyone is just going to go with the numbers and assume my work is simply awful, too.

            Does that mean all these things won’t happen or can’t be done?  Not at all.  My writing may be so utterly, mind-bogglingly spectacular the reader will forgive and forget those atrociously dull opening pages.  The structure could be so rock-hard that no one notices the abundant typos.  It’s even possible my idea is so fiendishly, unbelievably clever that nobody will pick up on the fact that every single character is carbon-copied from Game of Thrones   Yeah, even my dwarf, my teenage assassin, and my Princess of Wyverns.

            A nice, simple rule of thumb.  If at any single point I find myself questioning if something matters—I should assume it does.  Does my main character need to be developed more than this paragraph?  Will a reader care that I misspelled forty or fifty words?  Do I need to make that part of the story clearer?  Should I bother to look up the exact format rules for this?

            My default answer for all of these questions needs to be yes.

            Again, I shouldn’t be scared to do something new, because if I break the rules—break them well, mind you—I’ll get noticed and rewarded for it. 

            Just remember a lot of people break the rules because they don’t know what they’re doing… and I don’t want to get lumped in with them.

            Next week—okay, I have to be honest.  The next few weeks are going to be rough for me, from a blogging point of view.  One week from tonight I’m going to be down in San Diego at Mysterious Galaxy, talking with Daniel Price about his new book The Song of the Orphans. If you’re in the area, stop by and hang out with us.

            And then the week after that I’ll be back in San Diego for SDCC. I’m doing at least one panel, possibly two (but I haven’t heard back on that one, soooooo…), and I think there may be a signing or two and some cool Paradox Bound swag we’re giving away…

            So we’ll see what happens next week.  As always, please feel free to make requests below.

            Until then, go write.

            I wanted to talk about writing advice a bit.  The good stuff and the bad stuff.  I just did a few months ago, yeah, but this is a little different. 

            This time, I want to talk with you about taking those words to heart… or not.

            Here’s an ugly truth about writing advice. 

            I’d guess a good 40% of it is just people telling you what worked for them.  Here’s how I do characters, here’s how I do dialogue, here’s how I plot, here’s how I write fifty pages a week.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with this advice—it clearly worked for that particular professional.  It’s just a presentation problem.  It assumes every writer and project is like every other writer and project.

            Still, that’s better than the 50% of people who are bellowing advice that hasn’tworked for them.  The only thing sketchier than someone  with a lot of credits insisting “this is how it’s done” is somebody with no credits insisting “this is how it’s done.”  Or somebody who had a credit twenty-five years ago.

            What? A twenty-five year old credit should still count?  I mean, on one level I agree with you—it’s a credit.  But it’s a credit from another era.  Seriously.  Johannes Guttenberg may be the father of printing, but he’s not going to be much help if my Brother 5-in-1 gets a paper jam.

            Let me put it in these terms.  Let’s say we were talking about computers. Let’s say I knew someone who’d been a kinda-known name in computers twenty-five years ago. And hadn’t really done anything since.  How seriously would you take their advice about computer engineering?  Or programming?  Or breaking into the industry?

            Actually, I take it back. There’s one thing worse than somebody with no credits insisting “this is how it’s done.”   It’s when somebody with no credits wants money to tell you “this is how it’s done.”

            Anyway, that leaves us with, what… 10%, roughly?  Math isn’t my thing.  What’s that last ten percent of advice?

            You’ve probably seen it. It’s the folks saying “try this.”  Or maybe they’re a couple of provisos before or after their statements.  I’ve mentioned the idea of this here a few times.  It’s called the Golden Rule.

            No, not that Golden Rule. I made this one up.  The Golden Rule is one of the core things I try to put out with all the writing advice I offer here.  It goes something like this.

And it definitely won’t work for that guy.

            You see, writing is a very personal thing.  In the same way I can’t say “urban fantasy is the best genre,” I also can’t say “writing 500 words before lunch every day and another 500 words after is the key to success.”  Because it’s not. 

            Oh, it might be for some people, sure, but it isn’t for everybody.  There are people who write in the afternoon.  There are people who only write in the morning.  Some like massive outlines, some like very minimal ones.  If you ask a dozen different writers how to do something—anything—you’re going to get a dozen different answers.  Because we’ve all found what works for us.  That’s the golden rule.

            There’s a joke I’ve used  a couple times to explain this.  If the only time you can write is Sunday afternoons, and the only way you can write is standing on your head, wearing that “enhancing” corset you bought at the Ren Faire last summer, using voice-recognition software, but doing this lets you write 15,000 words…

            Well, that’s fantastic.  Seriously.  I know professional, full-time writers who don’t always get 15,000 words down a week.  I can maybe hit those numbers once a month.  If that’s what it takes for you to do it, and you can do it consistently—power to you!

            See, at the end of the day, how I write my book doesn’t matter.  Perhaps I write first thing in the morning or maybe late into the night.  I could work exclusively on a laptop, on my phone, on a typewriter, or on yellow legal pads with a #2 pencil.  Maybe I reward myself after every thousand words with half an hour of reading, a video game, twenty minutes of exercise, booze, sex, whatever.  Do I do one long, constantly reworked draft or two dozen drafts each with a few minute, specific changes?

            However I do it, that part of writing doesn’t matter.  As long as I’m working, I’m doing fine.  People can insist whatever they want, but at the end of the day it always comes down to the golden rule.

And it definitely won’t work for that guy.

            And none of us write like you. We don’t have your habits, your preferences, your thoughts, your goals.  We’re not telling your story your way.

            Which is why you shouldn’t worry about writing like us. Sift through all the hints and tips.   Learn which ones do and don’t work for you.  Don’t worry if four of the six people above do X, find out if X works for you.  Find your way to write.

            And if your way happens to involve a corset… hey, who am I to judge?

            Next time… I want to talk about babies.  I hate those guys.

            Until then… go write.