The Importance Of Being Critiqued

Before you send your manuscript to an agent, it is important that you allow others to read and critique your story. And by others, I don’t mean your mother, your spouse or anyone else who loves you and wants to see you succeed. The person or person who read your novel should be objective, familiar with the genre and the essentials of good writing. They should also not be afraid to hurt your feelings and rip your manuscript apart if necessary.

There are many online critique websites at your disposal. You have only to complete an internet search and a little due diligence to find one that works for you. If formalized critique websites are not your style, try using social media formats like Twitter or Facebook to find readers of your genre interested in critiquing your story.

Just as the best meals can be ruined by too many proverbial cooks in the kitchen, a well-written novel will suffer from too many critiques. If you let ten people read your story, you will have ten sets of critiques to wade through. Of course, if all ten readers point out the same flaw, obviously you should address it. But it is better to find one to two dedicated readers, whose judgment you trust to offer suggestions.

Your critique partners do not have to be writers but they do have to be readers, able to recognize grammatical, character development and plotting errors at the minimum. It is always surprising to discover what flaws other readers can find in your work-in-progress. But once found, your writing will only improve, as well as your chances of having an agent represent your manuscript.

Intern N

I see, you see, we all see...

Okay, that title wasn't particularly clever, as it doesn't include third person and it's not even the right words, but hey. I though using "scream" might imply something slightly different than the actual topic, which is:

Point of View!

Let’s talk about this. This is one of those things that, when you think about it, is generally pretty common sense. The problem is, I think people get so caught up in telling their stories and trying to get all the information out there, they don’t always think about it.

Some people have only a little trouble with this- a couple slips here and there, just something to keep an eye on. Some people have no trouble. Some people have lots of trouble.

The easiest place, in my experience, to have no trouble, is when you’re telling something from a first person POV. Because in first person, it’s pretty easy to tell what belongs and what doesn’t. Even when you’re not thinking about it, when you’re writing you generally know you can’t switch to someone else’s thoughts if your narrator doesn’t know them, unless your narrator is psychic. I think even if you weren’t paying terribly close attention, you wouldn’t make a mistake like:

“I was sitting at a booth and watching the bar door when my dad strolled in. He saw me and grinned.

‘Hey, Elsie!’

‘Hey dad!” I gestured for him to sit down.

Behind Elsie, Frank watched jealously, sipping his coke and thinking of the best way to get her alone.”

First person is probably (certainly?) the easiest way to get close to your main character. It gives them a very distinct voice that builds their character, instead of just basing it on their actions. But of course, it can be very limiting, because you know your narrator so much better than anyone else (unless you play around with how you use the first person. See: Sherlock Holmes, for example (but really, see them. The real, Conan Doyle stories, I mean. They’re amazing). Watson is the first person narrator, but the stories are, of course, actually about Holmes).

Third person is where it gets tricky, because there are so many ways to do it, and people try to combine them. Pick one.

Some people opt for omniscient third person, where the narrator sees and knows everything about everyone. This is easy because it lets you tell anything you want about what anyone is doing. It’s difficult because it distances you from your characters a bit more, so you’ll have to work on revealing their inner thoughts and desires without doing too much telling. And if your narrator is really going to be omniscient, you can’t get too close to one person for too long, because that’s more…

Close third person. Close third person is a favorite, and probably where I see the most mistakes. In close third person, you pick one character- your main character, almost always- and the third person narrator doesn't leave their side. Or their head, since you can usually see what they’re thinking, as well. The narrator is not an actor in the story any more than the omniscient narrator is, but they only know what the character they are close to knows. Thus, the narrator (and the reader) can’t know what other people are thinking or doing unless the main character knows, too.

An example: The Harry Potter series, with a couple of exceptions (generally one chapter in the beginning of the book that shows what Voldemort’s up to) is told in close third person, close to Harry. We don’t know anything until Harry does (well, we might figure stuff out faster than he does, but only based on the information he knows). The story does not, all of a sudden, follow Hermione for a day or an hour, even if what happened to her was important. We have to wait until she tells Harry about this. This is a drawback of close third-person (it would be really convenient if the narrator could just show/tell us what Hermione did), but it’s necessary. By not leaving the one character’s side (and mind), we know them intimately fairly quickly. It’s similar to first-person in this way; it’s an excellent way to really develop your main character. Of course, it’s also more of an effort to develop the characters you’re not close to. But (clearly) every POV is a give and take.

I've seen more problems with this than one might expect. A close third person narration will suddenly switch to a different character, which is horribly disorienting.

Don’t get me wrong: you’re allowed to switch viewpoints. Quite a lot of books do it. But it has to be at regular, set intervals- chapters, for instance. This is Jeff’s chapter, now Christine’s. It has to be obvious. The POV can’t switch in the middle of, say, a phone call. If the character on the phone is not the character we’re close to, we do not know what the person on the other end of the line is saying. We just don’t. Maybe they’ll tell us in a minute; but until then, we don’t know. A couple of other interns have written about changing POV, however (one about a year ago, and one in March), so I won’t go into too much detail about that. I do recommend those posts if you need help on that though.

To sum up, don’t stray. Switch, coherently, if you’d like, but don’t stray. Pick a point of view and be true to it, even when you’d like to let us know a bit of information that’s going to be hard to work in. It can be frustrating, but it’s worth it for a polished, coherent, smooth read.

This is more a call to double check your work than anything. I know that most writers know the differences between POVs. But like I said, sometimes it’s one sentence of slip-up, or just a switch that’s a bit disorienting. Make sure you know exactly where you’re going with your narrator’s voice, and make sure everything fits.

Hope this can help, live long and prosper and all that,

-Katie

Research Makes Perfect

Tip of the day from your friendly neighborhood intern: do your research. I know, it isn’t the most fun part of writing a novel—it’s tedious and time-consuming, and you want to get to writing your story and bringing the scenes in your head to life (although in theory you’re writing about something that interests you, so hopefully the research isn’t too boring). But trust me, it’s worth it.

One thing I cannot caution you enough on is the use of foreign languages in your books. I love the use of other languages in things I’m reading, I really do. I get excited. But I hate when they’re used incorrectly. And since I speak a couple of other languages conversationally, I often notice.

An example completely unrelated to my work here, so as not to offend anyone: at the pet store I work at, I once saw a bird toy that was made of coconuts and other things latin-american-y. The company, trying to be cutesy, decided to put some Spanish slogans on it. One of them was “Mucho grande!” Mucho grande means much big. Not even in English is that okay. I was not inclined to buy that toy for my bird (yes, I do actually have a bird), and when a novel makes this mistake, I’m not inclined to sing its praises.

Don’t use an online translator. I love Google translate; it’s my best friend when I need to know a word for a class. But if you don’t know the language and can’t use discretion, don’t try. “Mucho grande” could have been fixed by a literal translation (which is part of why it annoys me SO much), but often those don’t work for the everyday slang in dialogue (which is usually when you’re using the other language).

If you really want to use another language that you don’t speak, find someone who speaks it. It’s really not that hard in this day and age; we can find anyone we want on the internet.

In general, you can’t assume your readers won’t know this or that detail, or won’t care. Some readers are going to know more than you. Some, just because they’re curious, will look things up to see if you’re right. And you want to be right. If a character in your story has a disease, make sure you know the symptoms and progression of that disease really well. If you’re writing about a different time period, make sure all of your historical facts mesh (on this note, I also want to mention that it’s really okay for characters to have beliefs that mesh with their time period, not ours. Sure, we don’t want them to be bigots, but realistically, women’s rights (for example) didn’t come along until fairly recently. Not every guy from history has to be gung-ho for equality to make them a good guy. They just have to be good. And, you know. Not a complete bigot.).

Sometimes, readers even like to learn (gasp!). If you’ve done enough research on your topic (or even have enough background knowledge), you don’t have to stop at the simple, basic information. You don’t want a list of facts, of course, but if you can slip some interesting tidbits into dialogue or narration, it can add to the story. Be careful about it (remember what I said before about dialogue that’s obviously just there to tell the reader something? “Did you know that the leaning tower of Pisa took almost two centuries to build, and it started leaning after only a couple years of construction? But they stopped building it for almost a century so that the earth could settle underneath and it wouldn’t fall. It’s the campanile, or free-standing tower, for the cathedral in Pisa.”), but if it fits naturally into the story, go for it. This is why I love historical fiction; I love learning new things.

I thought this was going to be a fairly short post, but I don’t seem to be able to stop when I start rambling. I’ll cut myself off. Good luck and keep writing!

-Katie

Proforaednig Maeks A Difernece

Can you read the title of this post? If you stare at the words for a few minutes, you can probably figure it out. For those of you who have given up, it says: Proofreading Makes a Difference. Now imagine having to sit through an entire 50 page partial trying to read something like that? Not easy.

No doubt some of you are thinking, “That’s what spell check is for.” Well, spell check only looks for misspelled words. So many manuscripts I read have awkward passages that don’t make sense. They have repeated words and poor grammar. I know it’s thrilling to type the last period of your novel, but please do not simply Google a few literary agencies and send it off. You’re not even giving your book a fighting chance. After so much time spent planning the book, doing painstaking research, and writing, don’t you owe your master piece the respect of another look over? You’d be amazed at how much needs to be rework. You might re-write an entire chapter because you had an off day.

Here’s a little secret when it comes to proofreading: Your book needs to be virtually perfect. It needs to be so polished that it can go from the agent’s hands to the book shelves. Is their wiggle room? Absolutely—an ending may need to be changed or a beginning starts too slow, but the characters and plot need to be there. However, we won’t even get to that point if the novel is riddled with mistakes.

Now that you’re a big ball of stress, let me untangle you. There is hope and there is help! I would suggest joining an online critique group. They are much less hassle than the ones that you drive to weekly or bi weekly. The online ones are on your own time. One of the biggest groups lately is Wattpad. It’s a giant forum of posted books. People vote on their favorites, comment on their stories and offer advice to each other. Also, there is that added bonus of exposure to other people’s works. Critiquing others helps you to understand what’s wrong with your own stuff. If you’re looking for genre specific there are many options out there like RWC and Romance Critters, just search engine it.

Godo Lcuk!

-Ellen