The Ten Commandments of Writing #6: Thou Shalt Heed Thy Critiquers

It has been some time since I posted one of The Ten Commandments of Writing. I am returning to this series today with the Sixth Commandment - Thou Shalt Heed Thy Critiquers.

I've been running my writing group for over 20 years now. Various people have come and gone over the years. Some people have stayed for a little while and then moved on; others have been with us so long it's hard to imagine a time before they joined.

Then there are others who came once, for a critique of their masterpiece, who  threw a tantrum when one or two members dared to suggest that perhaps this piece needs some improvement, instead of heaping effusive praise on it, and then they flounced off, never to be seen again. Just a tip - don't be this writer.

The other end of the scale is the writer whose work receives a ritualistic flaying during a critique session, and they get so depressed they shove the work in a drawer and never finish it. I admit that this latter category has applied to me once or twice.

Sending your work out to a critique group takes courage. You have spent months or possibly years on your novel, sweated blood for it, gone through the usual rollercoaster of feeling alternatively like you're an undiscovered genius or a blatant fraud, and now you have to sit there while a group of people take it in turns to tell you how ugly your baby is.

However, it is something that every writer has to learn to deal with. A common mistake that many self-published writers make is that they don't get their work sufficiently edited. There is only so much a writer can do with their own work - you get too close to it to see the full picture. You need someone who's not involved in it to give an honest critique.

That's why it's important to have beta readers and critiquers. People who will tell you honestly, and frankly, what needs improving. The problem we have in our group, though, is that for everyone who says 'I didn't like your character - she's bossy and annoying' there'll be someone else who says, 'I love the way this character argues with everyone and stands up for herself''.

There is a balance between listening to all the criticism and not listening to any of it. If you belong to a regular critique group you'll get to know after a while which writers are on your wavelength, and which ones are genuinely interested in the genre that you write in. If you write cosy crime, for instance, you'll probably find that the critique from the person who reads a lot of cosy crime is more relevant than that from the person who only reads hard SF.

On the other hand, if there are six people looking at your work and five of them make exactly the same point, it's worth heeding it.

So this is today's lesson. Find critiquers. If there is no 'realspace' writing group in your area, join an online critique group. Or start a group of your own (well, it worked for me). Once you have found them, submit your work to them and be prepared to listen when they take the time to read and comment on it. And be prepared to get your heart broken, because it's never easy to accept criticism of your work.

But the only way to grow as a writer is to understand where you need to improve. No writer is beyond editing.

What Am I Doing At Geekfest?

It's nearly time for the Nineworlds Geekfest con! Last year was the first time this London-based convention - celebrating all things geeky - ran, and it was a fabulous event. This year sees it a bit more streamlined, but with just as packed a schedule, and I have no doubt it will be just as much fun.

Saturday I and other members of the T Party writers' group will be running an ideas-generating workshop entitled 'How to Beat Writers' Block'. This will be a series of exercises designed to trigger story ideas. Don't really want to say much about it at this stage (spoilers!) but we hope it will inspire people to go away and start writing something. In order for this to work we've limited it to 30 people so if you are attending the Con and fancy it, turn up early - it's on at 3:15 pm in the County A room.

After that I hope I get a chance to catch some panels before I am appearing on one myself - the intriguingly-entitled 'Noir - the Dirty Streets of Fiction' panel at 6:15 pm in County C&D. The only description we've been given of this is a quote from Raymond Chandler: "it seemed like a nice neighbourhood to have bad habits in". I've been thinking about this since I was asked to do the panel and I'm really looking forward to it. With noir finding its way into so many other genres, I think I can find a lot to say on this subject - assuming I don't get tongue-tied from the impressive line-up of Serious Writers on this panel (which include John Connolly, Will Hill, Daniel Polansky and Francis Knight).

I am also quite impressed with the Con's online schedule app, which not only allows each Con-goer to highlight individual sessions to create their own personal programme, but allows participants to see all of their activities all at once (here's mine).

There's also going to be a table for independent authors and small presses in the dealer room, so I shall take along a pile of SOUL SCREAMS to (hopefully) sell.

If you're at Geekfest do come and say hello - it's going to be a Con to remember.

Geekfest 2013 - The Lowdown

This past weekend saw the first ever Nineworld Geekfest Con, held in London.

The Con was billed as a celebration of all things geeky, and an excuse to have a really big party, and it was held in two hotels at London Heathrow airport - the Renaissance and the Radisson.  I was impressed by the fact that a Con without a track record was able to secure not one but two major airport hotels.

Though I was looking forward to the Con, with it being new I was expecting a few hiccups.  I have to say I was impressed with the level of organisation.  And the amount of choice.  There were so many tracks running, we were all spoilt for choice.  There was a creative writing track, a Tolkien track, a Dr Who track, a Geek Feminism track, a video games track, an LRP track, a board games track - to name just a few.  it was impossible to do everything.

There were some comments about the cost.  I think possibly this is relative - I'm used to London prices, where everything is more expensive anyway.  Although the Con itself wasn't that expensive - depending on when you booked, £75 could get you a weekend ticket to just about everything, which I thought was reasonable.  The hotel cost no more than I paid for my hotel room at the Brighton Cons I have attended the last few years.  The room was decent, the air conditioning worked, the bed was comfortable.  Yes we had to pay for parking, but £10 for 24 hours didn't seem overly expensive considering we pay £6 or more to park the car in Croydon for an afternoon of shopping.  Yes, the hotel bar was expensive.  But £5 for a glass of wine is not uncommon in a London hotel bar.  Sometimes bars are subsidised at Con hotels.  Genre Con-goers seem to have the ability to imbibe a lot more alcohol and yet still remain well behaved and less aggressive than your average non-geek after a few pints.  If the hotel manages to figure this out, maybe a deal will be struck for next year.

My writing group had arranged to do a critiquing workshop on manuscripts that had been submitted in advance, and this was scheduled for 1:30 on Saturday afternoon.  Since we drove up to the Con on Saturday and hit traffic, we didn't have much time to do anything else before this was on.  So hubby went off to the "In Conversation with Chris Barrie" programme item and I sought out the workshop.

We'd had seven submitted manuscripts split into two crit groups - one group dealing with historical and other-world fantasy and the other group (my group) critting the stories with more contemporary settings.  The crit session went quite well and no one ran off screaming after their crit, which is always a relief.

We finished earlier than expected and I was hoping to catch the second half of the panel on women in the Whedon universe.  But sadly this panel was so full they were letting no one else in, so I went off to take a look around the dealer room instead.  I caught up with Hubby here, who spent a happy half an hour spending money on the stall with all the old D&D modules.  I was distracted by many geeky t-shirts and jewellery, in the end deciding to spend my money on a pretty dragon pendant from the Pagan jewellery dealer I see at pretty much every Con I go to these days.

We left around noon on Sunday, and I left wishing I could have caught a few more panels.  But with so much going on, I think everyone came away wishing they could have seen more.

Buffy singalong. Photo credit:  London Nineworlds Geekfest

The highlight of my Con experience was the Buffy sing-along in the Saturday night, where we all gathered round a chap playing piano and went through every song featured in "Once More With Feeling".  And because we finished faster than expected, when he got to the end of the music book, he started again from the beginning.  You can see me singing away in this picture - I'm there near the front in the pink t-shirt.  The t-shirt actually says 'horror writer' on it and has an image of a cartoon grim reaper on it, but sadly you can't see it in the photo.  I let down my Buffy fangirl credentials by having to refer to the lyrics at some point for most of the songs.  There were some die-hard fans that knew every word.

There was a lot of Cosplay at this Con, and even if you don't participate in this yourself, it's fascinating to see the array of costumes, and see if you can correctly guess the geek reference.  Some of them were obvious to me - Dr Who characters; Marvel characters; the Alien.  Others I suspected were Manga characters, and these I am not as familiar with.

GeekFest made a point of making this Con accessible to everyone - regardless of gender, creed, orientation, physical ability, or anything else.  Children were welcome - there were many families at the Con.  Any item that was deemed to be for adults only was clearly labelled as such in the programme.  It was a Con where you could be who you wanted to be, not necessarily who you were born as.  The name labels were blank so you could fill in whatever name you wanted to be that particular weekend.  Many people stayed in costume - and in character - all weekend.  There was an LGBT track running all weekend.  There were even gender neutral toilets.  I have a lot of respect for the organisers for this.  This was a Con where everyone was welcome.  You could wear whatever you wanted, be  whoever you chose to be, and be accepted and welcomed, without the labels of 'geek', 'freak', 'weirdo' that so many of us have to deal with for being in some way different from what society perceives as 'normal'.

In summary, this is a Con I thoroughly recommend for anyone who has any remotely geeky tendencies.  Next year's Con has already been confirmed at the same venue, 8-10 August 2014.  Tickets are available, so book up now before the price goes up.

Fellow geeks, I shall see you there...

WIP Woes

When I first started writing, I used to scribble in the back of school exercise books, in pencil. Towards the end of the 1980s I got my first computer - an Amstrad PCW. It was one of the machines with green fonts on a black background. It didn't have a hard drive, so files had to be saved on floppy disks.

I tell this story because the influence that machine had on my writing is still with me today. Because the floppy disks didn't have much memory, files had to be small. I used to save each chapter as a separate file, because it would take several disks to hold an entire novel. I still use this system of saving each chapter as a separate document. Only when the manuscript is nearing completion do I compile it all into a single document - and only then do I really know how many pages I've got.

Currently, I'm working on draft 2 of the horror WIP. Up to now this has largely been minor amendments to each of the early chapters, though as I go through it I start thinking about any major changes that might need to be made. Things were going quite well until I got to chapter 12. And then I realised chapter 12 was missing from my 'Draft 1' folder.

An extensive search failed to unearth the missing chapter, but because I keep meticulous logs of when I write each chapter, I have worked out what has happened. The early chapters of the first draft of this WIP were written from October to December last year. At that point, I was still on my clunky old laptop, and my old NetBook. My writing routine has always been fairly rigid. If I was writing the chapters in Starbucks during my early-morning writing session, they were written on my NetBook. When I got home I would boot up both machines and copy the files from one machine to the other, so that there was a back-up. If I was writing at home, then I would transfer them the other way.

However, the old laptop was very slow, and sometimes waiting for it to boot up to transfer files was a frustrating process. What clearly happened is that when I was copying over my new chapters from the NetBook to the laptop, I somehow overlooked chapter 12 and didn't copy it.

I got my new laptop for Christmas, and copied the files from my old laptop to the new one. Then the hard drive on my NetBook died - suddenly, and without warning. All files were lost. That was OK, I thought, I had everything backed up. Or mostly everything. Only now have I realised I had failed to back up chapter 12, and the only copy of that chapter is now lost forever on the dead hard drive.

What I am left with is a log of how many words were in that chapter (1,330) and a summary of what it contained. But the file is gone. I have to rewrite it. And that realisation was a depressing thought.

So the next day, I got up early for a writing session, took the NetBook into London and sat in Starbucks staring at chapters 11 and 13 or quite a long time. I did not get hit with any inspiration to re-write chapter 12. What did occur to me, though, is that there are a lot of problems with this section of the novel, and there's a lot of rewriting that needs to be done. Maybe that's why I couldn't write chapter 12 again. There are a lot of 'talking heads' - people talking about things instead of doing things. Too much 'telling', not enough 'showing', as the writing group would probably say.

What I am attempting to demonstrate in this section of the novel is the changing personality of a character who is being possessed by a demonic creature, in the way he interacts with his friends, and how he's becoming more violent to his girlfriend. At present, the girlfriend tearfully relays to her friends how her boyfriend raped her. I haven't actually got a scene showing the rape. But I think I'm going to have to write it. The action will have a lot more impact than the telling.

I haven't been able to face writing this scene in this week's writing sessions. It's going to be a very difficult and harrowing scene, and writing such scenes can be emotionally draining. But it needs to be done. Sometimes your WIP takes you to places you really don't want to go to. But you have to go there anyway, in order to grow as a writer.

The ironic thing is, if chapter 12 had not disappeared, I would not have scrutinised that section of the novel quite so hard. Some times these things happen for a reason...

Writing Your Heart Out

Many writers know the meaning of BICHOK: "Butt in chair, hands on keyboard." And many writers have every intention of starting or finishing that novel. Sure, there's National Novel Writing Month, but the prospect of writing 50k words in one month is daunting. Not to mention it's the holidays and your relatives have designated your home as Turkey Central.

So you're not quite sure about NaNo (although I'd encourage you to try it), but you need a push to get your creative juices flowing. You need encouragement. You just need to get that damn story started.

Maybe you need BIAM_Writathon, an online writing challenge that occurs every April and October.  Organized by AnneMarie Novark, BIAM_Writathon is a chance for writers to lock their internal editors in the closet, give their muses free reign, and write their hearts out. The good news? No restrictions. Write a short story or a novel. Edit a work in progress or plan for the NaNo challenge.

I've done BIAM_Writathon a few times now and I don't always succeed in completing my goal(s). Nevertheless, I enjoy the group and look forward to it. This time, I hope to rewrite my werewolf novella and finish a vampire short story. That plus preparing for my NaNo project.

Interested in BIAM_Writathon? The Yahoo group is by invitation only. To learn more, http://annemarienovark.com/?p=151

Writing Lesson # 8: Planning

My first novel, SUFFER THE CHILDREN, began life as a short story called “Kiddiwinks”. It was one of the first stories I put to the newly-formed T Party, in 1994, and from there I decided to turn it into a novel.

The novel took ten years to write, and the main reason was there was a huge chunk of time in that decade – years at a time, in fact - when I wasn’t doing any work on it. I didn’t do any planning. I took the short story, thought about how I was going to expand it, decided who my characters were, and started writing. Then every once in a while I would get ‘stuck’. So I would leave it until I was inspired to carry on. Sometimes this would take two or three years.

Then eventually I got to the ‘just finish the damn book’ stage. I forced myself to sit down and write an outline of the plot – I knew how it was going to end, I just had to get it clear in my head how I was going to get there. So I decided I had to plan. After I’d finished the outline, I did a chapter-by-chapter summary. The chapters I had already written were easy enough – I could just summarise what had happened in each. And when I got to the chapters I hadn’t written yet, I looked at my outline, and worked out what had to happen in each chapter for me to get to the end. Using this method I was able to get to the end of the chapter-by-chapter summary, and then using this as a template, I was able to write to the end of the novel.

And I have used this method ever since. First, I do a plot outline – sometimes summarising the whole novel, but more often than not summarising first the main plot, and then each sub-plot separately. Using this outline as a guide, I plan what has to happen in each chapter, to move the main plot and all the sub-plots forward. Then, when I write each chapter, I refer back to my summary. Knowing what has to happen in each chapter makes it easier for me to start writing it.

The chapter-by-chapter summary isn’t set in stone. Sometimes as I go along, I find that the events that are supposed to happen in Chapter 10, say, are more complex than I anticipated, and therefore will also extend into Chapter 11. So if this happens I just amend the chapter plan. I might also find as I write that something quite unanticipated has to happen betweens Chapters 15 and 16 – so I just add the extra chapter to my plan.

Explaining all this in this way makes it sound like a rather complex process. But it means that my method of writing each novel with each chapter of each draft being a separate document on the PC makes more sense. It seems most writers I know work from a complete document. I only combine all the chapters into a full document when the manuscript is fully finished and is at submitting stage.

This method has helped me immensely, though. Although SUFFER THE CHILDREN took me 10 years to write, when I started on the next book after that (which, as it turned out, was my crime novel DEATH SCENE), I started with the summary and chapter-by-chapter breakdown, and I completed it in two years.

Hence, this is today’s lesson. Plan first. It saves much heartbreak later.

Writing Lesson #7: The Importance of Writing Groups

Around the time I started submitting things, it occurred to me there had to be a stage or two between my writing the story and an editor reading it. After all, I had no concept as to whether or not what I was writing was any good – I only had the enthusiastic praise of parents and teachers, who were hardly objective.

I have previously mentioned buying FEAR magazine because it looked like a possible market. In the first issue I bought, I noticed an ad in the classifieds section, from someone in Kent looking to form a writing group for horror writers. This was in the days before email (yes, kids, such a time did exist). There was a postal address. The address was not too far away from where I was living, so I sent a letter off to said address, introducing myself and my writing and explaining I was interested in joining a writing group.

A few weeks later, I got a response, naming a date and location for the proposed first meeting. This was, as I recall, some time in 1989. I was 19, and I hadn’t been back in England very long. My boyfriend of the time was really not happy about my traipsing across South London alone to meet a bunch of people who were complete strangers, and insisted on driving me there, even though he had no interest whatsoever in horror and thought it a strange fad I’d eventually lose interest in (that’s a story for another time, but suffice to say he’s very, very, ex).

So, the group met. There were about half a dozen of us, of varying ages. I had never before been in the company of so many horror fans – and most of them were fond of far, far sicker horror than I. For the first time in my life, I thought maybe I wasn’t so weird after all.

In these days before email, the format for the workshops was that people would hand out hard copies of their work, to be workshopped at the next meeting. After a couple of meetings, I felt brave enough to hand out my first offering – “The Top Floor”. I’d already submitted the story to FEAR magazine at the point it was workshopped, and, indeed, the acceptance letter arrived before the workshop date did. So I turned up at that meeting, and listened to everyone going around the circle, pretty much trashing the story, trying to mask my smugness. I have to say I probably failed. At the end, when the last person had had their say, finishing with something along the lines of, “I really can’t imagine anyone wanting to publish this,” I was able to say, “funny you should say that, because it’s just been accepted by FEAR”. There followed a moment of silence, and then some reluctant, envy-laden congratulations. Because everybody wanted to be in FEAR magazine in those days, and nobody in that particular group was.

Eventually this writing group evolved into the T Party, which is another story in itself (and if you really want to read it, there’s an abbreviated version on my website here). Things have changed over the years, but it started as a group to critique sf, fantasy and horror, and that mission statement still holds.

We are a lot bigger these days, and stories go out by email, instead of hardcopy. Over all this time, what has not changed is the group’s ability to dish out honest feedback. It can be pretty harsh, there’s no doubt about that. But what I’ve learned over the years has been invaluable in improving my writing. Sometimes I’ve come away from meetings feeling completely flayed, when something I’ve been working on for ages has been figuratively ripped to shreds. At those times I feel a little wounded, and often very depressed. But I’m normally not able to disagree with those criticisms. It’s usually a case of my thinking, “This is hard to hear, and I don’t want to admit it, but this person is right and there is a problem there.”

Being with the writing group has also helped me immensely in developing the thick skin that one needs to keep on submitting one’s work. I face rejection after rejection, and stuff just keeps going out again. Nothing that any editor or agent can say to me has ever matched the brutal honesty of the T Party.

And I’m actually proud of this. In spite of the fact that sometimes newcomers find this brutal honesty hard to deal with, I’m glad it exists. It’s made us all much better writers.

"Horror" Writer? Get Thee Behind Me

I told this story on my blog about three weeks ago, but it was received well and it seems relevant to this blog about the hardships of genre writers.

About twenty years ago, I was seeking a writing group and was encouraged to go along to my local writers' circle by an acquaintance of mine who was a member. She was a lady in her 60s. I, at the time, was in my early 20s. That should have given me a clue, in hindsight, but I was yearning to belong to a writing group so I thought I would give it a go.

I tagged along to their meeting, in the local library. The first thing that struck me was that I was the youngest person there. By about thirty years.

The meeting got underway, and it became evident to me that everyone else in the group wrote radio plays, historical romance, and the kind of twee short stories that are published in certain women’s magazines. Some of the writers had forged quite successful careers for themselves, but I hadn’t heard of any of them. That should have been my second clue.

Everyone was initially terribly enthusiastic and very friendly, all saying how nice it was to see a young person in their midst, and they were in need of new blood, and so on. Then they asked me what I wrote.

“Horror”, I said cheerfully.

The room went silent. Noticeably. Then someone piped up nervously, “oh dear. We’ve never had one of THOSE before.”

Everyone gave me a wide berth for the rest of the evening, casting nervous glances in my direction and pointedly avoiding my eye. I began to think that perhaps everyone in the room was suffering from a collective deafness. Had they misheard me? When I said I was a horror writer, had they perhaps heard “I have leprosy” instead?

Suffice to say that was the one and only meeting I attended. Granted, I was into fairly sick horror in those days (I have mellowed somewhat with age). It didn’t take me long to work out that it would be a mistake to show this group any of my writing. I did not want to be responsible for the death by heart failure of the entire membership of the writing circle.

But I did learn that day that genre writers are often considered the social outcasts of the writing world. Now, at least, I know others. We weirdos need to stick together.