Alpha SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers

Where to Submit Your Stories

Sarah Brand — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 01:22:05 +0000

If you want to become a published author, the first step is to send your work out to paying markets. For novelists, that means writing query letters and proposals and a bunch of other stuff we’re not talking about today. Short story writers have it a bit easier. Finish your story, choose where you want to submit, format the story according to the magazine’s guidelines, perhaps include a brief cover letter, and drop it in the mailbox (or more often, just hit “send”).

But as you might imagine, there’s more to it than that. There are lots of different short story markets. They pay different rates, have different response times, and (most importantly) want slightly different kinds of stories. So, where should you send your story?

For my part, I keep a speculative fiction markets cheat sheet with basic information on my favorite magazines. If I’m happy with a story, I submit it to a few markets on that list where I think it might fit, in an order determined by what the markets pay, whether they’re SFWA-qualifying (more on that below), and what the response time is like. There’s not one right way to go about submitting, though, so I asked some of my fellow Alpha bloggers about their submission processes.

Elena Gleason:

Now that I’ve been submitting stories for almost five years, my process is pretty fluid and relies on a vague combination of which markets I think would be a good fit for a given story, average response time as given by Duotrope.com, how much the market pays, and my perception of the market’s prestige. However, before I’d been around long enough to get a really good handle on what markets were out there, what types of stories each one preferred, and how each market was regarded by the speculative fiction community, my process went a little something like this:

Look at the list of SFWA-qualifying markets (pro-paying markets that the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have deemed appropriate venues for accruing the three pro sales necessary to get SFWA membership). Eliminate any that don’t accept work in my story’s genre. Look up response times on Duotrope.com. Submit to each appropriate SFWA-qualifying market beginning with the one with the shortest response time and ending with the one with the longest. When all SFWA-qualifying markets have been exhausted, do a search on Duotrope.com for markets paying semi-pro rates within my genre. Again, submit by response time. (If Sarah Brand’s cheat sheet had been around back then, I would have used that instead of the Duotrope search–it’s much simpler than wading through Duotrope search results, and you can be reasonably sure that the market has been vetted by trustworthy writers.) Do this until the story has been submitted to every appropriate paying market, at which point, alas, the story is trunked.

Rachel Halpern:

I’ve learned two methods for how to decide when to submit what where — work down from the most prestigious markets, collecting great rejection letters as you go, or work up from small markets where you’re more likely to get published. I can understand both sides — just getting published at all would be amazing, to me, but if I’m not going to be I’d like the best rejection letters possible. And if I wrote a story that could have gotten accepted somewhere great and got accepted for less money and prestige, that would be sad, I guess. So that makes the prestigious markets sound best. But if your story is exactly good enough to get published in a fun but less famous publication, you don’t want to miss out. Since you just can’t know that, I like starting at markets where I’d be thrilled to be accepted but where I feel there’s at least a faint theoretical possibility, and then places that aren’t as dazzling but sound like they might take the particular story I’m offering, and then I aim for prestigious places because why not?, and then I aim less prestigious/lower paying/etc.

Cassie Krahe:

I haven’t sent out anything new in a while. I mostly get a sense of where I think the story should go as I write it, and since what little short fiction I read these days (and it is a very little) is entirely online, those are the markets I know best and can best recognize a story for. A lot of it is mood/tone, being able to tell a Strange Horizons story from a Beneath Ceaseless Skies story–SH is more litty, BCS a little more adventurey, things like that. Then I just go through the list according to fit more than anything.

One thing about having a story that is going to sell, dammit, is that I do look at market listings more, and that spurs me to send out more. If I don’t continuously check things and remind myself that yes, submitting is something I do, I slow and stop. It’s been that kind of while.

I’m really unlikely to send anything to a paper-needing market right now, if only because I am out of printer paper. Data point.

Rachel Sobel:

I write so slowly that I’m sort of a spoiled brat about markets, and thus tend to prioritize by the haphazard calculus of pay rate and response time weighed against prestige and suitability. Generally, pay rate wins over everything else, because, being a starving student, I feel like the impossible is even more awesome if it makes you rich.

As a tiny baby writer, selling stories is such an infrequent thing for me that it still feels sort of like free money for something I’d do anyway, and as such it’s often hard to justify prioritizing on that count. On the other hand, I’d like to put in a word for rank commercialism: even if you regard writing as an untoward hobby, if it’s the untoward hobby that finances your book habit, that’s probably not entirely a bad thing.

The takeaway:

Familiarize yourself with the markets before you send anything out. Read their submissions guidelines carefully. Know what they’re looking for. Don’t be afraid to send your work out to great magazines that lots of people read, as well as to smaller ‘zines that carry prestige. (If your work can’t get accepted by a well-regarded market, do you want the public seeing it?)

Want more advice on submitting? Feel free to ask questions in the comments, or check out these posts from Shimmer magazine: Mastering the Cover Letter and Short Stories Are Not Novels.

Best of luck!

Submitting Stories for Publication as a Young Adult

Elena Gleason — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:18:03 +0000

As a young person, you are likely to get a lot of writing advice along the lines of “practice makes perfect,” implying that you are still young, you have your whole life ahead of you, and you should focus on “practicing” your writing, stashing it all away someplace where no one other than friends and family will ever read it and honing your skills for the day when you will magically transform into a Real Writer.

This is a load of hooey. If you write, you’re a writer, regardless of age. And age should not be a barrier to sending out stories to short fiction markets or novels to agents and publishers. There are plenty of reasons not to submit, of course, but none of them should be simply that you’re too young. I have a secret for you: Nothing happens overnight when you turn eighteen, or graduate from high school (or college), to make you into a pro writer.

However, it is true that not all writers are ready to embark on the journey of story submission. In this post, rather than focusing on the circumstances under which you shouldn’t submit, I will instead focus on four criteria you should meet before you start sending your fiction out into the world.

You and others see pronounced improvement in your writing since you started writing seriously. The reason people are always telling teenagers to wait until they’re older to think about sending stories out is that most of them have only just started writing. And only one or two absolute geniuses are brilliant when they first get out of the gate. If you haven’t been writing for at least a couple years, you probably should wait a while to develop your skills. This is true for adults as well–not every writer gets started young, and adults aren’t magically good at writing straightaway either. However, if you’ve been writing and finishing things for a few years and you are at the point where you look back on your early writing and cringe in horror, and your long-term readers start remarking on how good you’ve become, it might be time to think about letting some of your recently completed stuff loose.
You have had your writing critiqued, and have revised with these critiques in mind. Every story can always be improved upon, and critiques are absolutely critical for being sure your story is actually saying what you want it to say. Read my post on getting critiques for further advice in this vein.
You are proud of your finished product. If you find yourself hesitant about a particular story or scene, trust yourself. There have been innumerable times when I’ve sent out a story with the niggling feeling in the back of my head that perhaps the ending wasn’t quite strong enough, or the main character’s personality not strongly enough defined, and inevitably my rejection letters reflect this. If you read your story through and finish your read-through thinking, “This is awesome,” that is the story to submit. If you don’t think your writing is any good, editors aren’t likely to see things differently.[*]
You are ready for rejection. It is a fact of writing life that you will be rejected. Repeatedly. Probably multiple times for every story you send out. You cannot submit a story expecting it to be grabbed up by the first editor who lays eyes on it. Or the second, or third, or fourth. Most of your stories probably won’t be fished out of the slush pile at all. There are enough writers out there churning out the stories that editors need to be extremely picky, and a lot of perfectly good stories are never published. I try to treat story acceptances as bizarre, almost random events that just happen to sometimes crop up at the end of the submission process in place of the normal rejection. If you think your writing self-esteem will suffer if your stories are rejected, wait a while longer before you start submitting.

If you’ve met those criteria, you should probably pretty up your latest masterpiece and send it off. But before you do, keep the following in mind: When you submit, do not call attention to your age. In fact, avoid including any information in your cover letter that might clue the editor in to the fact that you’re younger than the average submitter. If an editor reads in your cover letter that you are only sixteen (fourteen, eighteen, twenty-two) or infers your age from the fact that you mention publication in your high school or college literary magazine, she or he might approach your story as amateur writing, knowing that you can’t really have been at it all that long. For this reason, it is not a good idea to include your age in your cover letter if you do decide to submit your fiction as a young adult. Some young writers think that this will impress editors (“Only fifteen and s/he can write this well? Wow!”), but the fact of the matter is that no editor will purchase your story unless it impresses him or her when judged against every other story they receive, and including your age might just make the editor want to pat you on the head and tell you to send them something when you’re older, before they’ve even read the first line of the story itself.

One last thing to keep in mind: Don’t treat story submission as an activity having the end goal of getting published. You are young, you do have your whole life ahead of you, and while getting published at such an early stage in your writing career might be exciting, it’s not really necessary. When I first started submitting stories at 18, I considered it practice. I just tossed a few things out so that I could get a handle on the process and start getting a feel for the various markets and their editors. And it worked. Now, at the ripe old age of 23, I have what I consider a pretty good idea of the types of stories most speculative fiction (or at least fantasy, since that’s my genre) venues like, and I’m much better able to tailor my submissions accordingly. (I don’t really think it needs saying, but just in case: This does not mean you should submit stories you aren’t proud of to editors in the name of “practice.” If you repeatedly send editors bad stories just to see what happens, they will remember you, and will approach future submissions with considerable apprehension.)

There will be posts here in the future on such topics as proper manuscript format and finding appropriate markets, and one from me expanding on my views on story submission as a goal in and of itself. So hang around for lots more practical advice on getting your stories out into the world.

[*] There is an exception in the case of writers with writing self-esteem issues, of which there are many. If you are one of those writers who never thinks their writing is awesome, find trusted critique partners who can advise you on whether you should submit your stories, and which one(s) to submit.

***

For Science!

Allison Jamieson-Lucy — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 11:00:06 +0000

At Alpha this year I gave a presentation on the intersection of science and writing, with handy tips for how to do science right brilliantly and wrong elegantly. A significant portion of it was conducted in enthusiastic mime, which is sadly lost with the transition to text, but I hope that with some imagination you too can visualize me hopping up and down in front of a blackboard pretending to have vestigial arms.

It starts with a question. (Everything starts with a question.) Why care about science?

Care about science because it explains how the world is put together. Science isn’t about cool glassware and facts and the names of animals–it’s about a lot of people getting together and asking one question, over and over again in a thousand different ways. The question is how does the universe work? and it’s one of the more important questions out there. It’s also still unanswered, despite centuries of effort. When exactly science stopped being a bunch of guys sitting around a table with a big pitcher of wine explaining to each other how the universe ought to work became Proper Science is up for debate, but it’s been a long time in any case.

This is relevant to you as a writer of science fiction and fantasy because you’re building your own universe. Even if your alternate world is vastly different from ours, there’s still merit to learning what sorts of questions science asks. You’re going to be asking them too, even if your answers come out different.

Give science a chance, and try not to hate it because people have a tendency to declare I’m not a science person. Not being a science person is probably a plus. To be perfectly honest, many science people are unsettlingly mad. They’ve got a big space in their head itching to prod at things, and that strange dark humor that comes from working every day around things that are extremely dangerous or extremely fragile or extremely expensive or some combination of the three. By the time they age into half-retired double-PhDs, they radiate eccentricity that comes from being intently interested in one very narrow question for forty-odd years.

You don’t have to be a science person to steal the ideas scientists have had. You can never know too much about the world. The most incidental facts will often spin great stories. Read about how biochemical pathways regulating metabolism work. Understand evolution and ponder dark energy and learn the several (relatively inane) theories trying to explain why we sneeze when confronted with bright lights.

All of this should go into a story, a beautiful story that works like the real world works and shines like a flawless gem under all scrutiny.

And now stop, and realize that it’s a story, which is going to have a stubborn plot and an impatient reader. Interesting things like teleportation and faster than light travel turn out to be frustratingly impossible, even though the story might hinge upon having them.

Another question, then, and the second part of this post. How do I make the impossible story parts work without upsetting the science (and the dear reader)?

When something has to give, there’s the gentle art of handwaving. Handwaving is being carefully vague, setting off distracting explosions and glossing things over with techno-babble, all to ease the reader around holes in the logic of a world. Messy handwaving gets you ‘some herbs,’ and adds drag. Well executed handwaving gives the reader’s suspension of disbelief a boost and saves everyone from long, convoluted workarounds.

Handwaving works because readers, especially readers of science fiction, fantasy and horror, are a generous bunch. They’ll give writers magic and whizz-bang guns and aliens with wrinkly foreheads as long as it’s earned.

There are a thousand ways to earn your factual stretches in stories. Humor lets you get away with many evils. Moody atmospheric pieces can do almost anything. Simply being aware of the tropes and the trouble spots earns you big points.

People will believe in things with consequences. People believe in things that have stupid complicated official names and clever nick-names. People believe in technical difficulties. Presented with a shiny new neutron-star generator that runs on biomechanical parts and the power of love in the depths of space, come on, please. If the neutron-star generator worked for two days and promptly broke, meaning that everyone is fighting the crotchety backup generator from three decades ago, okay, fine with that.

The most fantastical element is completely acceptable as long as it operates on the same logic that real things operate upon. Even without explaining the technical minutiae, something can feel real if it has well thought-out limitations and consequences.

Bear with me a moment and think about your cell phone. What do you know about it? It’s small, and you use it to call other people who also have a cell phone. It runs on batteries that are never stay charged quite as long as you’d like them to. There’s a tower somewhere out there, that gives you signal, although the signal can’t get into basements or mountain ranges for some reason.

It is a bad idea to drop it in the toilet.

You probably do not know the formulas of the chemicals that give your battery its zip or the name of the software running on your screen. You could find out by sitting down to do some research, but you won’t because your understanding of a cell phone is from a user’s perspective, and your phone feels perfectly real to you without picking it apart.

If your characters are looking at their family-friendly time machine from a user’s perspective, they’re not necessarily going to know any more about the gears and gadgets that drive it than you know about the innards of your cell phone. They are going to know which button to push for central heating and where to park it on a busy day.

For every odd bit of technology introduced to the world there’s a wealth of changes, some subtle and some decidedly not. Cell phones affect our world. So do microwaves, and fighter jets, and DNA sequencers. If your world has whizz-bang guns and nano-tech, sit down and think about everything that’s different because they’re around. It’s the little consequences, like the signs that warn to turn off cell phones when you enter the theater and the increased cost of tuna during the undead squid epidemic, that make the big ones believable.

Readers want bizarre, impossible things. As a writer, it’s your job to make them believe in that impossible thing, with science and handwaving to help you.

Remember to love your research. Remember that science isn’t scary, although it is vast and slightly mad.

Remember that every world has scientists who are asking how the universe works, but remember that your characters are often not those scientists. Know where it is normal to be vastly ignorant, and where you do have to explain yourself.

Remember that universes have rules, that changing the rules has consequences, and that those consequences stick around.

***

I’m Allison Jamieson-Lucy, biochemistry/art student at Grinnell College and Alpha attendee in ’09 and ’10. I write of stories mostly composed of witty banter and foolish hijinks.

I Meant to Do That!

Catherine Krahe — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 05:52:57 +0000

So I have two Rules of Writing (so far). Be specific, be intentional.

Time to unpack that second one. I’ve broken it into several categories.

Be intentional: Everyone plays favorites.
Everyone has favorite characters and types. For a long time, almost everything I wrote involved a tall, skinny, white, redheaded female outcast. I am tall and white, I grew up something of an underweight loner, and I still think red hair is way cooler than blonde or brown.

Not good reasons to always use the same character.

I could usually handwave or worldbuild a justification for it, but those were after-the-fact, tacked on to cover what, even then, I knew was a problem. My characters were weaker because they weren’t intentional– I didn’t think, “How can I show that this character is genetically different from her family? I know, redheaded stepchild!” but, “It doesn’t make sense that she’d have red hair. I’ll, um…” and then handwave frantically.

The Redheaded Outcast is not the best character for the job, she’s just the first character to come to mind.

Case in point, though it doesn’t involve the Redheaded Outcast: Totipotent.

When I wrote that story, Bea was a man named Barry. First thing to come into my mind– here are two partners, Mosy and Barry. I thought a lot about Mosy, not at all about his human. When I sent it to my crit group, they were understandably confused, not only because I didn’t give enough information in the story but because I was in Pronoun Hell. I changed Barry to Bea…

…and the story got better. I avoided Pronoun Hell, first off, and Bea works as character in a way that Barry didn’t. I wrote two stories with Barry and only one with Bea, but Bea’s the one who has stayed with me. She does exactly the same things Barry did, but she changed more than the pronoun.

I used Barry because he was the first character to come into my mind. I didn’t use him on purpose. I used Bea on purpose, and she works better.

This holds true for relationships between characters– do you find yourself writing lots of brothers holding their own against the world*? What about the traditional Disney family, with a princess and a king but never a mother? Does every protagonist have a snarky older sibling who’s probably just jealous?

*this pattern in particular annoys me because I see it so often… and never sisters.

Look at your settings: are they all Fantasyland, a generic urban fantasy city, steampunk London, or the interior of an otherwise undescribed spaceship?

Did you do it on purpose?

Try to see your patterns and remember that you can break them. Pay special attention to stories in which you have to handwave or otherwise justify irrational decisions– those are when you may have used the wrong character or setting.

Be intentional: You, me, and an ass.
This is part of the previous point, but it bears separating out.

Did you notice what characteristics I didn’t list for the Redheaded Outcast?

She’s able-bodied. She’s more or less an atheist. She comes from a culture where it is assumed everyone will have enough to eat. She’s able to go off on her own without worrying about anything other able-bodied adult humans would worry about. She hasn’t been physically abused. She has all her teeth.

These are things that are true about me, but they are about me on a different level from ‘blonde’ and ‘white’, partly because I haven’t dug into them as much. These are things it doesn’t even occur to me to mention, nor think of. I sidestep them entirely because they are so much a part of how I see myself, but not something I’m used to doing on purpose. I don’t write the Redheaded Outcast any more, but almost all my characters are still able-bodied, not fat or short enough to affect them as more than description, and secular.

I have missed opportunities here.

It’s easy to spot a line of redheads through a dozen stories. It’s harder to pick out assumptions about how the world, and the people in it, work.

Again, this carries over to settings. Have you considered what the average person in your steampunk city thinks about science? If you do, you now have choices about how they’ll react in a riot, how they’ll treat your lab-coated heroine, and what happens to decommissioned war machinery. If you shrug it off– if you don’t take charge of that decision– well, you don’t have those choices.

Assumptions are really hard to find sometimes, but when you kick one over, you get a new set of challenges. We’re spec fic writers. We love new things.

Be intentional: The Third Artist
I have no idea where I first heard this story, and of course it’s been heavily filtered through my brain, but I think it summarizes some of the problems beginning writers have.

Build a gigantic, beautiful art museum, fill it with all the greatest art you can think of– paintings, sculptures, textiles, everything. Take a bunch of infants and raise them in this museum. Give them all the materials they want to create more art, inspired by the glorious work all around them.
Build a second museum to house their creations, and raise a second generation of artists in it.
Build a third museum, and then look at the art that the third set of artists create. They’ve never seen a tree, but only the painting the second batch painted, inspired by and imitating the first batch, who are inspired by and imitate the paintings of people who have sat in the shade on a college quad, walked home through a winter’s night and been wary of the crows, and seen row upon row of saplings at the nursery waiting to be planted in the spring.

No one ever means to be the third artist.

Look at the stories you take in. Do you read a lot of urban fantasy? When you write about werewolves, do you go to folklore and animal behavior texts, or do you steal the cool bits from Patricia Briggs and Kelley Armstrong? Did you mean to write a wolfpack inspired by your favorite books, or did you think you were being wholly original?

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with taking inspiration from others’ work. There’s a conversation going on through a lot of stories– this is part of why it’s so much fun to pick them apart and study them. Every fairy tale retelling is part of a conversation. Every vampire, scary, sexy, or sparkly, is part of a conversation. Every second-world fantasy is connected to Tolkien, Jordan, and C S Lewis. It’s a very slow discussion, yes. But– you knew there was a but– you have to know what you’re saying. This means saying it on purpose.

Be intentional: A gentleman never offends accidentally.
I have written horrible stereotypes both racist and sexist, invoked patriarchal tropes, reinforced assumptions based on cultural misunderstandings, and generally been ignorant of context. Some of this was when I was thirteen and hadn’t heard a lot of racial slurs or encountered feminism beyond Girls Can Do It Too, Probably Better; some of this was when I was twenty and thought I was enlightened enough; some of this was this year, and I probably haven’t figured it out yet.

Did I set out to offend? Nope. So the fact that I did so counts twice, both for the error and for the lack of intent that led to it.

It’s better to be offensive because you have considered your options and consider giving offense to be the best of them than because you had no idea it would be a problem. “I didn’t know that it’s always the black guy who dies,” effectively removes you from the conversation– you didn’t know, so what else can you say? You have unwittingly reinforced a trope you didn’t mean to and that you might not like, having met it. “I wanted to show that the idiotic white kids will survive because their parents have money and other white people are more willing to welcome them, and that the black man who did so much to keep them alive ends up dying not because of the monsters but because of racism from the white humans they finally meet,” opens up a discussion. You’re using the trope rather than having it use you.

Be intentional: But what have you done lately?
Most of the rest of what I have to say is philosophy-of-writing. This is a mechanics issue.

You’ve just written absolutely the best story. Everything came together– the characters are perfect, the setting’s novel, the political system is bewilderingly appropriate, the action makes it hard to sit down even though you’ve edited it a dozen times, the emotional arc still makes you cry. It all just happened, like a lightning bolt out of a clear blue sky, and you sell the story and win a Hugo and live happily ever after.

So what do you write next?

Lightning doesn’t strike every story, and if you wait for it to do so, you’re going to be out in the rain a long, long time. If your brilliance happens by accident, you can’t repeat it. Maybe what you thought was lightning was actually gamma-radiation. Maybe it was the bite of a radioactive spider.

You can’t order lightning. All you can do is pay attention to what makes a story good, lightning or not, and then do more of it. Look at your sentences and how they work. Don’t accidentally write a wonderful sentence and then accidentally write a dozen clunkers– pick that first one apart, if you’re lucky enough to have it, and then intentionally write more wonderful sentences. Don’t stumble into the perfect group of wounded characters and try to meet more by stumbling into random people. Notice the wounded characters, study their interactions, and for the next story, build a better group.

Learn from the lightning-strike story. Don’t put up copper pipes and saw down every tree in the neighborhood hoping for a second strike– figure out how to hook up a generator. Don’t despair that you can’t recapture that effortless blaze of perfection– take it as an example. You are capable of great things.

If you do it intentionally, you can do it twice.

Beginnings

Rachel Halpern — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 12:38:16 +0000

Everyone seems to do beginnings differently. Some people start with a single line intended to somehow encompass the entire story. Some people start mysteriously, with statements you won’t understand until several paragraphs or pages later. You can start near the end, start in the middle of the action (in medias res, like Homer!), start with dialogue, with suspense, with a perfectly normal day that’s about to go haywire.

Here’s a rule I learned from quite a few publishers – and they’re the ones accepting the stories, so unlike most of my advice, this bit is actually really solid, not just from my experience. Don’t start with “I woke up.” Your character doesn’t need to wake up. They do that every day. We know that for the story to take place, they must have awakened at some point. Skip it.

Everything else here is a mix of what I’ve heard, what I’ve seen, and what I’ve tried.

I’ll start with a piece of advice I’ve heard that has really worked for me – the place where you start writing and the place where your story really starts are not always the same place.

This is important for me, because I always have to write my way into anything, and sometimes you just have to start writing at “I woke up” and go from there. You might write through a whole day of action to learn who your character is and what they do on a normal day. Only then does the weirdness start. But often your story starts not with the normal day, but with the crazy day that comes afterward. One strategy I’ve seen and liked is to write and, when the story’s over, to go back and see if you can cut the first page, or at least the first scene. Get to the action faster, with less setup. There have been scenes that I’ve had to write to understand the story that, looking back, my reader doesn’t need to understand the story. It’s surprising how much of the beginning can be thrown away sometimes without losing anything. So just think – where does the really important stuff begin?

The beginning of the story has various purposes. Of course it needs to set the whole story up, either hinting mysteriously or giving necessary information or just starting into the plot. But most of all, especially in short fiction, the true goal of a beginning is the hook. If you can’t convince the reader within a page – preferably within a paragraph, or even a line – that this story is worth reading, it’s hard to get it read, let alone published if that’s your goal (and it might not be! Writing is fun for writing’s sake. But a good story should capture the reader’s attention no matter what).

But what counts as a hook? Well, at Alpha, we sit in a circle, read our first lines aloud, and have people raise their hands when they’re hooked by the story. It was a good way to see what, in fact, catches people’s attention and makes them want to read more. Asking friends (or, better yet, critiquers) whether your beginning grabs their interest is a good way to see if it’s working. Of course, you have to consider your audience. One particularly morbid year, we were all forced to the conclusion that with that group, the best way to grab anyone’s attention was to kill someone within the first paragraph.

Not every audience is going to want a dead body in the first line, and not every story has any dead bodies to use. The exploding spaceship is a famous eye-grabber, but really good writing, a line of particularly clever dialogue, a mystery that needs solving, a hint at something coming – any of these will pull the reader in. If your story doesn’t start with action, you could start instead with something surprising, something strange, or something funny.

Basically, I’ve found that what works for me is a combination of being aware of what makes a good beginning, cutting away the start to get directly into the action, and checking with people to make sure the start draws interest enough. There are other methods – you can try to always start immediately with an action or suspense scene. Witty dialogue is often a good grabber. You can start with a mystery, or with a surprise, or with your main character looking back over the events to come. I’ve seen people use these tactics, and they work. Not having perfected them, I tend to start simply where I think the story starts, and hope that an interesting first line and a plot-related first scene will carry the story.

Those are the general strategies I’ve seen and the ones that work f or me. Beyond that, the one trick I’ve seen to starting a story is a quick teaser from the end of the story. If anyone’s read Twilight, that’s a perfect example – start in the middle of the climax, and then back up. A lot of TV shows do this too – an explosion or a murder or a fall, and then the little subtitle: One Day Earlier. Then the show actually starts. If the real beginning of your story is while your main character is doing something relatively boring, and you need a hook, then you can do that, put the climax at the beginning so you get people’s attention. This is actually a pet peeve of mine; stories that do that kind of drive me crazy. I vote you just make your beginning interesting. But that’s completely personal preference, and lots of people do it, so it must be a decent method. If that’s what works for your story, that’s an easy way to get some action in before the action starts.

Most importantly, the first line, paragraph, and scene – that’s what you should polish the most. It’s the first thing a reader sees, and a mistake or an awkward sentence can sometimes lose the reader as easily as an exploding spaceship can grab one.

What do you think? How do you write beginnings? What holds your interest when you start a story? What tactics did I leave out? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Note: In the comments, there’s a mention of the “Red Line of Death” exercise. This is an alternative to the hook exercise I mentioned earlier, where people raise their hands when they’re caught and want to read more. In the Red Line of Death, someone (at Alpha, we were shown this by a top sci-fi magazine editor, but you could have anyone do it, the way the hook exercise worked) puts a red line on the manuscript at the moment where he or she loses interest in the story. Because it’s focused on losing instead of catching a reader, this sort of exercise makes it easier for a piece with solid writing to do well vs. one with a distinctive action hook.

The Four P’s of Exposition

Sarah Brand — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 11:12:57 +0000

Writing unobtrusive exposition — that is, getting a story’s background information across in a way that doesn’t interfere with narrative flow — presents a unique challenge if you’re writing science fiction, fantasy, or certain types of horror. Not only do you have to worry about things like characterization and foreshadowing, you also have to make sure the reader understands that everyone in the story is actually a plant-person living on Mars. (Or, you know, whatever.) Details of an alternate history, the workings of miraculous yet ever-present inventions, the subtle and finicky rules of magic, all of which your characters probably take for granted… these things can be tricky to convey. What’s a speculative fiction writer to do?

There are lots of ways to write exposition well, and unfortunately, there are just as many ways to get it wrong. So in this post, instead of talking too much about specific strategies, I’m going to set forward four general criteria for you to consider when you’re thinking about how to make your exposition work.

1. Plausibility. However you choose to convey a certain piece of information, it should feel natural to the reader. The classic way not to do this is to set up a conversation where Alice says, “As you know, Bob, we are both plant-people living on Mars.” Why on earth (or Mars) would Alice bother to say something that is so obvious to both of them? That’s a pretty silly example, true, but new writers often fall victim to more subtle forms of this particular disease. Check your dialogue to make sure your characters aren’t telling each other things that they both already know. If they are, put yourself in your character’s shoes and look around. If you’ve done your worldbuilding properly, there will be a host of clues you can use to establish where and what Alice is. Use those instead.

2. Pacing. You might have lots of important information to share about your invented world or your main character’s backstory, but it’s generally a bad idea to do it all at once. Lots of paragraphs packed full of information — which are often called infodumps — can be difficult for the reader to absorb, especially if you’ve stopped the story in its tracks to tell us all this and we’re not quite sure yet how it relates to the main storyline. There are rare exceptions to this rule; if your writing is very sharp and the content of the infodump is sufficiently interesting (both things you’ll want an outside opinion or two to confirm… see Elena’s post on how to find a critique), you may be able to get away with it. But generally it’s easier on the reader if you sprinkle important information in as you go.

You do want to avoid the opposite problem, of course, which is when you put in so little information that the reader isn’t sure where or when the story takes place or (in the worst case) what’s even going on. It may take a few drafts, but with careful attention and good outside feedback, you should be able to find a balance.

3. Point of view. One useful way to think about exposition is that all the background information that isn’t given via dialogue originates as thoughts in your narrator’s head. This can be limiting–as mentioned above, Alice probably does not spend much time dwelling on the fact that she is a plant-person–but being careful to stay inside your character’s head can be beneficial in other ways. Giving your character’s thoughts about the exposition in question can provide an opportunity for characterization, making the exposition more than just a dry recitation of facts. And if the character is hopelessly biased or simply wrong… well, that can make the story even more interesting.

One thing you definitely want to avoid is what I call “exposition mode,” where a character’s thoughts or dialogue simply stop sounding like her own voice because the writer is so wrapped up in setting down the needed information. Ask three people to tell you the same story, and they’ll use different analogies, emphasize different details. What does your character think is important about her magic? What does she compare it to in her mind? What parts does she tend to overlook?

4. Pertinence. After hours of research and even more hours of thought, you have devised what you are pretty sure is the best magic system ever. It is intricately detailed, and all the major branches have their own histories and unique pitfalls. Is it awesome? Quite possibly. Does the reader need to know every last detail? Probably not.

The key thing here is to not think of your exposition as a separate thing from the story that needs to be imposed on the narrative, but as an organic part of it. If background information is important, it won’t stay in the background. It will become relevant and affect the characters’ lives somehow. If you can’t think of a way to fit the information in naturally, the reader might not need to know it just yet, or at all.

There is, of course, the case of foreshadowing, where information early in the story is mainly there to pave the way for a bigger revelation later on, but it still follows this rule. When this is done well, it’s usually because the information is useful to the reader on two levels: one that they accept while they’re reading those words, and another that only becomes clear later on. Readers are smart. If the foreshadowing-information is in there for no apparent reason whatsoever, you may as well put a flashing arrow next to it saying, “Hey, look, it’s a vital clue!”

In short, while we often think of exposition as background information, it should ultimately become a part of the foreground. Avoid contrived and awkward dialogue, pay attention to pacing, stay inside your character’s head, and make sure whatever you’re saying is actually relevant to whatever’s happening in the story, and you’ll be well on your way to writing exposition that works.

Thanks for reading! Have any tips of your own for writing exposition? Fire away in the comments.

Finding Good Critiques

Elena Gleason — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:27:56 +0000

So, you’re sitting at your computer (or scribbling in your notebook), and you write the last sentence of the last paragraph on the last page of your story. If you’re like me, after you’ve written those last, glorious words, you take a moment to sit back and revel in how awesome you are. I mean, dude, you just wrote a story. How amazing is that? Then you take a few hours, or maybe even days, to relax, content in the knowledge that your story has made its way out of your head and onto the page, and it is done.

Congratulations! You’ve just conquered what is in my opinion both the most important and the most difficult aspect of writing: concluding a story. However, there is a vital difference between concluding a story and finishing it, and the next step is what I’m here to talk about today: getting critiques. Because some of you, after a bit of a rest, will start to have misgivings. “Does it really make sense for Johnny to kill Beatrice before he kills Todd?” you may wonder. Or, “Oh god, did my characters actually ride off into the sunset at the end? Will anyone notice that cliché, or did I manage to pull it off without being hokey?” Or you might just have a vague sense that that scene in the middle with the jackalopes doesn’t quite work but you can’t figure out why.

What this means is that you need critiques. And those of you who don’t have these misgivings, who continue to believe that the story you just wrote is the best thing you’ve ever written and it is perfect and ready to be unleashed on the world? You need critiques too. In fact, you probably need them even more, because as fantastic as your story may be (and I’m not denying that it is), the fact that you can’t find anything wrong with it probably just means that you’re too close to the story. You love it too much to be able to see its flaws, which means you need to find others to help you suss them out.

Once you’ve realized that you need a critique (well, preferably at least three, to get a variety of perspectives), the next step is locating a few people to give you some, and this can be tricky. Many beginning writers naturally turn to their friends and family for feedback on their stories. This is usually a very bad idea. While your friends and family are often the people in your life most enthused about reading your work, they are also usually very unlikely to provide you with a good critique. There are two reasons for this. One reason is that they love you. This means that they might not want to hurt your feelings by telling you negative things about your work, which is kind of the whole point of the critique. Family members are especially prone to this attitude, because your parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles probably still see you as a kid, and kids should be encouraged in their hobbies and praised for a job well done. I mean, if your nine-year-old brother/cousin/neighbor handed you a story and asked what you thought about it, you wouldn’t want to tell him that his talking dog wasn’t very believable and that all the other characters being magically transformed into dogs at the end is a deus ex machina that negates the protagonist’s agency and provides the reader with little emotional payoff, would you? And your family probably feels the same way toward you and your writing, no matter your actual age and ability to handle criticism.

The second reason family and friends might not be the best place to get critiques is that they might not be writers themselves, and thus don’t necessarily know what pitfalls to be on the lookout for. As much as they may love reading, it often takes a writer (or someone well versed in literary criticism) to be able to grasp what sort of structures underlie good stories and be able to offer you concrete suggestions for improvement rather than vague “something might be off here, but I don’t know what” type criticisms. There are exceptions to every rule, however, and some of your family and friends, especially if they are writers themselves, may make fantastic and enthusiastic critiquers. However, I’d still advise you to get at least one critique from someone a bit less close to you.

The best people you can find to give you critiques are other writers. Many writers find it effective to join a writers’ group, either in person or online. Your school might have a writing group, or the public library, or a local bookstore. And if there isn’t one, you could probably start one yourself without too much difficulty. If you think you’d enjoy in-person critiques (and are perhaps longing to make a new writer-friend in your area), local writing groups can be good places to start your search. However, these groups can also be extremely hit or miss in regards to type and quality of writing. For instance, I joined my high school’s writers’ group freshman year, and not only were there no other speculative fiction writers, there were no other fiction writers, period. I spent a few months struggling to provide feedback on teen angst poetry and patiently receiving critiques that almost inevitably began with the phrase, “I don’t read this sort of thing, but…” before deciding that that was not the best way for me to get feedback on my writing. I know plenty of people who have succeeded in local writers’ groups, however, and they’re worth exploring.

If you’ve checked out the local groups and found them lacking, or there aren’t any, or you just want to skip that step because you are painfully shy and think you’d prefer online critiques (I empathize), there are plenty of places to get critiques on the internet. However, as you may already know, the internet is full of a lot of crap. And not every online writing community will actually be able to provide you with a decent critique. There are plenty of websites where you can slap up a story and get some ego-boosting comments like, “Wow, this is great! Character x is sexy. I wish he were my boyfriend, lol.” And if you get negative feedback, it’s often not of the constructive type. Finding a good, solid critique on the internet can be harder than it seems, hard enough that some people pay for the privilege (the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror is one such place, charging $49/year or $6/month).

But it is possible to get good critiques for free, especially if you’re willing to return the favor. And the very best way to get good critiques online is to give them. If you read someone’s story and provide them with a lengthy, in-depth critique, that person is more likely to give your story the same considered treatment. (If you missed Rachel Halpern’s excellent series of posts about how to critique, definitely go read them now!) Most of the better online writing communities actually require you to provide critiques of others’ work in order to receive critiques on your own writing, so be prepared to put in some work.

A couple sites that I think deserve special mention are the Young Writers Society and Critters. The Young Writers Society is pretty informal, and operates using a forum. The major downside to this community is that the boards are public, which means that posting your story there could be considered publication by some story markets who define publication more or less as “available to a wide audience” (i.e., the entire internet). So don’t post anything you think you might want to eventually submit for publication. However, this is a great place to meet other new writers and talk shop, and often critiques can be done using private messages between individuals rather than posting to the boards, avoiding the pitfall of accidental publication.

Once you’ve reached a stage in your writing where you feel that you’re perhaps no longer a wet-behind-the-ears beginner, Critters is a fantastic place to get critiques. It describes itself as a group for “serious” speculative fiction writers, so you might not want to jump into this one straightaway. Critters uses a more rigid workshop format that has you critiquing one story per week, with your story waiting in a queue for other members to see it. If your rate of critique drops below 75%, your story is held until you reach that percentage again. As a bonus for the novelists I’ve neglected thus far in this post, Critters will also critique novels. One of my favorite things about Critters is that it’s dedicated solely to speculative fiction, so your critiquers will have the genre framework for your story that critiquers who aren’t genre readers will lack. You also get a ton of critiques (an estimated 15-20 per piece), so you’re more or less guaranteed to get at least a few good ones in the mix.

There are a lot of other places to find critiques, many of which I’m sure I don’t even know about. Explore! Try new things! When you get a good critique, foster a relationship with that critiquer, because even if you decide that the venue in which you received the critique isn’t to your liking, you can always start forming a network of good critiquers with whom to swap stories. Eventually you might reach a magical stage where you have enough critique partners to form your own private critique group where everyone is certain to get good critiques every time.

So, writers: Where do you go to get feedback on your writing? What works and doesn’t work for you when you’re looking for a good critique?

***

I’m Elena Gleason, Alpha alumna of 2005 and 2006. My stories have appeared in Fantasy Magazine, and I’m currently pursuing a master’s degree in Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I like to avoid actually writing by talking about writing and writing resources, so look for more posts from me in the future on topics like when to know if you’re ready to start submitting stories for publication and how to go about doing that, and having a positive attitude toward rejection letters. You can visit me online at http://www.elenagleason.com.

How to Critique: Part Three – Questions

Rachel Halpern — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:12:52 +0000

I’ve already talked about the process of critiquing, both for general comments and for line edits (You probably want to read How to Critique: Part One and How to Critique: Part Two before you read this post). There are or will be other blog entries by other people on how to write plot or worldbuilding or exposition, so I don’t want to spend a lot of time on what those “should” be like in the story you’re critiquing. And, in any case, every story is different and every approach is different. Instead of a set of rules for what the story should be like, I’d like to focus on the process. Since the process will also vary somewhat each time, I just want to provide a guide to the questions I ask myself when I’m doing general critiques, questions you might find helpful as you’re thinking about the story you need to critique.

This post is a list of those questions, and a few suggestions for what to do with the answers.

Characters:

Do I find the characters believable? Do I care about them, positively or negatively? Do I believe that they would take the actions they take? Are they distinctive, memorable, three-dimensional?

Do the characters change throughout the story? Is the main character a different person at the end of the story, altered by their experiences and the choices they make (this character arc is essential to the story, so the answer should definitely be yes)? Do I believe that change?

Plot:

Is the plot convincing? Do I believe everything that happened would really have happened, given that situation and those people? Is the ending set up by the beginning? Does the pacing work, or does the story feel a) so slow it’s boring, b) so fast it feels rushed, or c) full of holes, so that it’s hard to tell what’s happening when? Could the story stand to be longer or shorter? Do the events of the story matter – do they matter to the characters and do they matter to the reader? Is the end of the story different from the beginning?

Setting:

How about the setting? Is it convincing, interesting, worth reading about? Is it a white-background story — could you lift everything in the story and put it anywhere, anywhen? Do the characters seem suited to the world as if they are really from it? Is it borrowed from traditional stock settings, or has the author made it their own? Has real effort been put in to make the customs, language, landscape, etc. fit together naturally?

The genre element:

Is the magical/technological element essential to the story? Does it work logically, or does it appear that the magic can do whatever the author wants? Is the fantastic element interesting and at least somewhat original? If the fantastic element were something else entirely, would it change the story (the fantastic element should be necessary to the plot; if you could replace zombies with unicorns, or worse if you could replace the magic with a completely normal automobile, then there’s something wrong with the magic/tech system)?

General reactions to the story:

Are there events, places, or people that could be cut from the story and never be missed? Does it need something else to work?

How do I feel after reading this story? Is the conclusion satisfying? Did I enjoy it? Did I care what was going to happen?

You should be thinking about most of these questions (and, of course, many more) as you critique. You’ll find the questions that work for you as you go along. As for answering them, just remember that your opinion counts, and your job is to make this the best possible story. If you have suggestions, offer them. If it felt flat to you, then you should tell the author that.

Whenever possible, as you answer these questions, you should be specific. If it felt flat – why? Were the characters unconvincing? Did the plot end in a way that was totally unsatisfactory? And if so, were the characters unconvincing because their actions were illogical, or because the dialogue was poorly written? Was the plot unsatisfying because it was unlikely, because it was depressing, because it didn’t resolve the problems the story introduced, because nothing happened? Try to be precise. If you can find examples in the text of when the characters behave illogically, bring it up. If you can think of some action that would have made the plot make sense, suggest it. You want to give the author as much to work with as possible.

Meanwhile, though it’s always helpful to be specific, and it’s usually good to give suggestions, that doesn’t mean you have to every time. Even if you don’t know quite why you felt a certain way about the story, it’s probably still worth mentioning. After hearing the problem, the author might be able to fix it even if you aren’t quite sure what the solution should be.

If you haven’t read the last two posts in this series, and you don’t know quite how to use this post, I suggest going to the two previous posts (Part One and Part Two) and taking a look!

And for those of you looking for critiques of your own work, keep an eye out for Elena’s upcoming post on “How to find a good critique,” which will be up this Friday.

So what do you think? Do these questions help you? What do you ask yourself when you’re critiquing, or looking for a critique? Talk amongst yourselves in the discussion section! I’d love to hear your thoughts.

How to Critique: Part Two – Line Edits

Rachel Halpern — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:26:39 +0000

(This is part two of three in my series of blog posts on how to critique. I recommend reading part one before part two. Part one, on general comments, is the post right before this one. It’s called, conveniently, How to Critique: Part One.)

Line edits are slightly more controversial than general comments. A lot of people don’t bother with them, and some people even refuse to read them. But even when I don’t pass line edits along, I’m virtually guaranteed to do them, and I wholeheartedly recommend them to anyone else working on a critique.

So, what’s so great about a line edit? Well, especially with a final draft, line edits are great for those small problems that lose the reader. Grammatical errors, awkward sentences – these will lose the reader and someone needs to read closely enough to point them out. That’s your job as the critiquer. But that stuff isn’t anywhere near as important in the early drafts, yet I still consider line edits to be essential to my critiquing process.

Here’s why line edits benefit me as the critiquer:

For one thing, it forces me to really experience the story, every line, and think about it. If the story loses me, is it the plot’s fault, or is it really just that phrase? More importantly, though, it lets me see not just that the plot (or the characters, or the setting) doesn’t work, but when and how it doesn’t work.

When I go through a story, I comment frequently to see what’s going wrong with the experience and the story. If I find myself in the middle of a page with no idea what’s going on, I mention it. If I realize the twist ending halfway through, I mention that too. When I get to the end, my line edits will tell me when I figured everything out, and whether being confused was too frustrating. I’ll remember why it was that I decided I just didn’t like the main character. All of that lets me give feedback that is precise and detailed, rather than vague. “The plot didn’t work for me” is an acceptable critique, but “The plot would have worked had I not figured out the twist on page six when Alphonse cryptically shouted ‘No, they’re alive!’” – that’s actually helpful. That’s something specific the author can change. And if I hadn’t marked it in the text, I would have had to do a reread, trying to figure out when it was that I figured out they were alive (or when it was that I decided Alphonse was too stupid to live, or why the whole middle of the story was confusing, or whatever the problem actually was).

Now, you guessing the ending, hating a main character, or being totally confused – that might be the author’s intended effect. They want you to watch the horror unfold slowly, knowing it will go wrong. They want you to hate the main character so you will laugh at his pain. And they plan to clear up all that bewilderment in half a page. That’s entirely possible. On the other hand, they might think they’ve kept you guessing until the end; they might think Alphonse is inherently lovable; and they might imagine they’ve been clear in that passage. Either way, they should know whether it’s working.

Sometimes, when I get to the general comments, I realize I’ve found a major problem with the story halfway through. I can then take entire paragraphs of commentary out of the line edits and move them to the end. Rather than being distracted by trying to remember just what I’d thought, I make a note in the margin (or, on a computer, using track changes or parentheses). Then if it turns out to be really important, I leave only a quick note in the text, and put most of the suggestion into the general comments at the end.

So, that’s what line edits can do for you. They allow you to give precise, helpful feedback instead of generalities, and they serve as reminders to you as you’re writing the general comments.

Here’s my process for what to do in line edits and how.

Grammar. It’s the least important thing to look at in line edits, because the entire section might vanish with a plot revision, but while you’re there you might as well take care of it. If the story is actually moving toward a final draft, then this is definitely something to keep an eye out for.

Awkward sentences, confusing phrasing. This is only a slightly bigger deal than grammar. Again, this is something to save for final drafts or just to note in passing in earlier drafts. The main reason to look at this in before the final draft is if it’s a recurring problem. If the author constantly switches between the past and present tense in the middle of scene, that’s worth mentioning. If the characters “shriek” or, worse, “ejaculate” instead of “say” things? Maybe make a note of it. On the whole, though, this isn’t all that important except in a final draft, or if the author asks for help on this specifically. (Note: I tend to do this anyway, because I find it helpful. I’ve discovered over years of writing fiction and essays that sentences which sound perfectly logical in my head don’t always make it in translation. I’ll read and reread them hearing only what I meant, and then someone will come along and tell me it’s ugly and incomprehensible, and that really helps me. So I comment all through on awkward phrasing. Up to you.)

What’s going on? This is where the confusion stuff comes in. I once read a story where I kept coming up with theories of what was going on throughout – things I thought were strongly plausible from the text but weren’t true. Going back, I realized the things I totally misinterpreted were supposed to be valid hints about the Actual Truth. Whoops. So I marked throughout what I thought those hints meant. My confusion doesn’t make it wrong, but it’s important for the author to know that even though you’re reading closely and really thinking about the story, you have no idea what’s going on. This applies also to getting the “twist” ending really early in the story, or to places where the prose becomes so dense it’s impossible to tell what’s even happening.

Places where the experience isn’t working. Did I think that death scene was funny? Was I bored during all the action scenes? If I don’t think I’m reacting well, I’ll point that out.

Notes toward general comments. If I see a problem with plot or a character or something, I’ll put it in here as well as in the final, general comments, so that the author can look back and see what I meant when I referenced a specific moment. More on this in my post on the general story comments, at Part One, and in my list of questions you can ask as you critique, at Part Three.

It’s important to note with all of these line edit suggestions that they can be positive or negative. The majority of your comments should be constructive criticism, pointing out where things don’t work. But if a specific phrase really dazzles you, or there’s a section of dialogue that’s perfectly natural, or everything suddenly comes clear in the last page – let them know. It’s nice for them, and it helps them see the difference between what works and what doesn’t work in the story.

Now that you’ve done line edits, what’s next? See my post on what a critique should be, back at Part One (that’s the post directly previous to this one), or a list of questions to ask yourself when you critique, at Part Three: Questions (that’s be the post right after this one).

So what do you think? What’s the best critique you’ve ever gotten? Still think line edits are garbage? Talk amongst yourselves in the discussion section! I’d love to hear your thoughts.

How to Critique: Part One

Rachel Halpern — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:07:54 +0000

Welcome to the first post in my three-part series on How to Critique!

Now, obviously I am not magically the Best Critiquer Ever Born in the Universe. This is a mix of the stuff that works for me when I’m critiquing and the stuff that I like critiques to do for me. Other critiques can do more or less, and may have a totally different focus (and feel free to talk in the discussion section about the way you critique!). But here’s my take on the critiquing process.

First of all, I think of stories as an experience on a page. The author’s goal is for the reader to feel and think a certain way throughout the story. Obviously every reader brings something different to the story, but there’s still a baseline goal. You shouldn’t know who the murderer is until page 15, you should cry when this character dies and laugh when this other one does. You should understand how my magic system works within two pages (or twelve pages, or perhaps not until the glorious last line).

The story is also, of course, a story. It should have characters (whether lovable or loathsome, they should matter, and they should have character arcs – that is, the events of the story should change them), it should have plot (something must happen that changes things, there should be action of some kind even if it’s just really meaningful dialogue, and at the end the reader should have the satisfaction of a story worth having reached the end of), it should have theme (what is the reader getting out of it?), and it should have all the things that support that. Some of the big ones are dialogue, setting, description, mood, pacing, exposition (all the information your story needs to convey, like the character’s past and the way the world works), and a significant element of the fantastic (in a genre story, anyway).

That’s what the story is – a story that creates an experience for the reader. Now that the author has created it, your job as the critiquer is twofold. On the one hand, your goal is to make those big story aspects work as well as they can. Do you find the characters, plot, setting, etc. believable? Do you care about what happens? Does the plot work logically? Do the characters have an arc? Is the setting done well? Does the magic (or technology) have an important bearing on the plot? And so on.

You are also responsible for discussing the ways in which the experience works or does not work. You’re reading far more critically and distantly than a mere reader, but you should still be able to enjoy and experience the story. Are you sad when sad things happen? Happy when you should be happy? Do you get caught up in the story and wonder what will happen next? Do you fall into the world? Anytime the answer is no, you should be analyzing why. Sometimes what throws you out of the world of the story can be something as small as a grammatical error or an awkwardly phrased sentence, reminding you that are, in fact, just the reader. Sometimes it is something bigger – an implausible decision, a spectacular coincidence, or a passage that simply fails to capture the humor or tragedy of what’s happening in the story.

Now, I think everyone who critiques agrees that the major part of a critique is the critique itself, a written section where you talk about the big stuff, summarize your thoughts on the story, and talk about what really needs fixing. If a character is unbelievable, if the plot fails, you say it here. You’ll see more on that in a moment.

The other part of the critique is line editing the story – writing in comments throughout the actual manuscript. Some people don’t even do line edits. To me, they’re almost as important as the general comments, whether I’m critiquing or receiving a critique. For my post about how to do good line edits, and why they’re not useless but actually awesome, please see How to Critique Part Two: Line Edits (the next post after this one).

So, back to today’s topic: the general comments at the end of a critique, the part where you fix the essentials of a story in big dramatic ways.

Here’s the thought process I follow in writing the general comments at the end of the critique. My critiques are usually divided into three sections, each explained separately here.

Something nice. I always stick the complimentary stuff at the beginning, and rehash some of it in a summary at the end. In between I mostly just rip the story apart. Wherever you put it, this is an important rule: Always make sure you have something nice to say about the story you’re editing. Most of the time you should like something about the story, even if it’s just a particularly beautiful piece of description. Don’t lie, because that won’t help the author, but find something nice to say. I usually try to put at the minimum two small things and one bigger thing. Big things might be “character seems to be your strong point,” “the pacing worked for me,” or “the ending completely tied up the loose ends.” Smaller things could be something like “The title was really cool,” “your first line kept me hooked,” or “the dialogue on page three made me laugh.” If a story is strong on several major elements, I do typically put them all here, at least listed briefly, to give the author credit and to assure them that those parts, in my opinion, don’t need as much work.

A concluding paragraph to sum it all up. Here I try to do something simple, saying what worked and what didn’t, and what I really think they should work on. Yes, this sounds like the kind of thing they make you do in school. My theory is that teachers make you do it partly because it works. You can write really long explanations of why something should be changed in the middle of the general comments. At the end, just remind them which pieces need to be changed and what you liked about the story, without justification. This gives them an easy list of action items of what you thought was most important that they fix.

Then there’s all the critical stuff in the middle. This can take a lot of forms. For me, this is largely composed of the stuff that hits me at the end of the story. I can go through line-editing a story and finding almost nothing wrong, get to the end, and suddenly see why the plot doesn’t hang together and actually the villain wasn’t scary at all and I have no idea where that story took place. This is where you put the big stuff – plot, character, theme, setting, exposition, whether the story works and why it doesn’t.

I usually sit and reexperience the story for a moment, then go back and look for line edits to remind me what reading the story was like.

I’d like to note here that as you look back over the story, even if you don’t know why you felt a certain way at the end, it’s probably still worth mentioning. The author might know what to do to fix it even if you aren’t quite sure.

If you do have a fix you can suggest, that’s even better. For small things, you don’t need to suggest a fix for every detail – the author has spent a lot more time with the story than you have, and probably knows how to change small things. But for big things, it’s the suggested fixes that can take the critique from good to brilliant.

Most of the best critiques I’ve ever received were the ones that didn’t just tell me “I don’t believe in the characters’ actions,” or even, “I would like this character better if…” but the ones that told me something even I didn’t know about the story. I was once told, “I think your character is keeping this a secret because he’s… is he afraid of himself?” And the whole story came together. Even I couldn’t figure out why my character was being so pigheaded, and it was the core of the story. Knowing he didn’t trust himself also changed his motivations throughout the story, and led me to some other realizations that changed the plot substantially.

You won’t be able to do this with every critique. Some stories, you’ll only see the surface stuff. Some stories, you’ll see there’s a problem but you won’t know how to fix it. That’s all right. Probably the author can do it, pointed to the problem, and showing them what doesn’t work is what you’re there to do. But if you have insight into the story, share it. The worst the author can do is ignore you, and at best it might fix everything. To me, that’s a really great critique.

This is the hardest thing to explain how to do, of course. Because it doesn’t always happen that you can really see something and think This! This would fix everything! All I can really suggest is that you look for the core of the story. What is really good about this story that has to be kept? Is there a small change – or even a huge fundamental change – that would really bring that out? I once saw a story about the relationship between two characters where the far more compelling story was in the main character’s relationship with someone else entirely. What is the author missing?

These things might sometimes be really hard. Sometimes you reach the end and you’re just not sure what was wrong with that story, or you can’t find anything to say. To help you with that, I don’t want to tell you what you “should” see in the story. Every case is different. Instead, I’d like to offer up a list of questions to ask yourself as you think back over the story. You can find the questions in my blog entry on questions, at How to Critique: Part Three - Questions. And don’t forget, for my blog post on line edits, go here to How to Critique: Part Two – Line Edits.

So what do you think? What’s the best critique you’ve ever gotten? What process helps you just “get” what should be fixed in a story? Talk amongst yourselves in the discussion section! I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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I’m Rachel Halpern. I was a student at Alpha in 2007 and 2008, and staff in 2009. I write fantasy and like to help other people with their stories at least as much as I like writing my own. I also like dark chocolate, socks, and the smell of bookstores. Besides a three-part series on how-to-critique, I’ll be writing on fairly random topics from story-beginnings to humor.