How to Handle a Manuscript Critique

I’m in the editing phase for one of my novels, one that’s especially close to my heart, and I recently got notes back from my trusted critique partners and beta readers.  One of my betas is a very dear friend of mine, and when she was done with the manuscript, we went to a local microbrewery to have pizza and beer and talk about the book.  We sat down at one of the shiny, dark wood tables and whipped out our laptops. My beta started scrolling through my manuscript and telling me all the places where she paused, thought something was off, found a typo. At one point she asked me, “Joan had sex with Alex*, right? I mean, is that what you meant to imply in this scene?”

It was not what I meant to imply. 

“Thanks,” I said.  “It doesn’t really matter what I meant.”

And it doesn’t. 

Step one of handling a critique is to receive it.

No explaining, not to your reader, not to yourself. No attempts to justify the inclusion of, say, llamas in your contemporary romance. There are only two things you may ever say in response to a critique.  The first is, “Thank you.” The second is something like, “When you say you thought the chase scene didn’t make sense, did you mean the one where they chase llamas across the mall parking lot, or the one in the kitchen where she’s running after him with a frying pan?” Thanks, or a request for clarification. That’s it.  No explanations, no “But the llamas are crucial to the plot!”, no “Maybe you just don’t like llamas!” Shut up and receive.

It’s crucial that you make every effort not to spout off these explanations and justifications even to yourself. Just for a little while, pretend everything your reader says is the absolute truth, because in a way, it is. Her experience of the book is valid, even if it isn’t the same as your experience. That’s why you asked for her help in the first place. When those explanatory voices pipe up, have another beer and say, “Thanks, that’s an interesting point.”

Now you’re ready for step two. Take that critique and ignore it.

Critiques are like jumping into too-hot bathwater. They sting. (For me, anyway. If you’ve figured out how to take the pain out of statements like “I kind of hated your hero…sorry!” please tell me your secret.) The way to get through the pain is to live with it for a little while. Don’t think about it too hard. Let that critique sit on your hard drive for a day, a week, whatever it takes.

Ignoring your critique doesn’t just take away the sting. It helps make those persistent voices shut up. If you think about it too much, the need to EXPLAIN! will take over. You’ll get into a useless conversation with your critique and convince it that the llamas are necessary. You’ll be very satisfied with yourself, because the critique will just sit there saying the same thing over and over again. Easy argument to win. And the book will suffer.

Once the critique has been sufficiently ignored, you’re ready for step three: deal with it.

Now that you’ve calmed down and realized the llamas really are unnecessary, it’s a lot easier to cut them out. There may be points on which you simply don’t agree with your reader, and that’s okay. It’s critical here not to write off a response as “a personal thing.” All responses to books are personal. But it is okay to sift through those personal responses for the ones that ring in harmony with your vision of the book.

Many, many times, I’ve gotten notes back from multiple critique partners, and everybody has a problem with a particular scene. Say this happens with your parking lot llama chase scene. Somebody hates the llamas, somebody else thinks it would work better if it took place in an amusement park, somebody else thinks the dialogue between the hero and the heroine sounds stilted. What this means is that something is wrong. Nobody—including you—is sure what, but it’s your job to figure it out, and figure it out you will.

So there it is, handling a manuscript critique in three simple steps:

1. Receive it.
2. Ignore it.
3. Deal with it.

You may have noticed a secret step in there at the very end. Step three-point-one: Believe you will get it right. Having faith in yourself during a critique may be the hardest step of all, but keep believing. Trust in your voice, in your vision, in your characters. It may take time, multiple re-writes, lots of chocolate or bourbon or macaroni and cheese with bacon. But as long as you don’t give up, there’ll be a better book on the other side.

What’s your favorite trick for handling a critique?

*Names have been changed to protect the unpublished.

New Serial Short Fiction Up!

I've started participating in a fun, interactive writing project with my fellow 2012 Golden Heart Finalists (aka The Firebirds).  Today, my first contribution is up on the Firebirds blog.  It's an interactive serial short story in which readers pick what happens next, and the next segment will be written by Darynda Jones, RITA-winning author of First Grave on the Right (and the whole, excellent Charley Davidson series).  Darynda has a hilarious voice with a dark edge to it, and I'm thrilled (and more than a little humbled and nervous) that she's going to pick up the story.  The rest of the series will be written by a team of talented Firebirds from all over the world (from Australia to India to South Carolina) with all kinds of awards (including the Golden Heart and the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery).  It's going to be a blast seeing where our team takes this story.

So...go check out Part 1 of Pray for Night.  It's a short, fun read for your Friday coffee break. There are zombies.  There are nuns.  There are phone numbers on cocktail napkins and drunken debauchery at charming pubs.  And I have no idea what will happen next, so go vote and help us out!

Burn the Boats

4028mdk09 / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0

When the Spanish conquistador Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he burned his ships on the beach.  There was no going back.  It was survive—conquer—or die.

I’ll put aside for the moment my moral argument with the Spanish conquistadors, and the fact that this story is utterly false.  (According to Wikipedia, he scuttled the ships to prevent a mutiny.  But whatever.)  Sometimes, it’s a pretty useful philosophy for living your life.  Choices, second chances—these things can be paralyzing.  If I can always go back, how can I move forward after a decision?

This is how I’ve been feeling revising my latest book.  It needs work.  I need to make some big changes.  But there are multiple ways I could take the story, and I’ve been stymied in a swamp of possibilities for weeks.  The only way to get out, I think, is to pick one boardwalk out of the marsh and burn the rest of them to the ground.

Usually, when I’m revising, I save every deleted word.  You never know when you’ll need it, right?  But not this time.  I’m hitting delete on tens of thousands of words and not looking back.  The only way out is to write my way out.

How do you force yourself out of tough spots?

Booklovers Anonymous

I own too many books.

I recently moved, and there’s nothing like moving to force you to face facts.  There were six large Rubbermaid bins full of books in the storage unit attached to my old apartment.  That’s in addition to the books stacked rightways, sideways, and any way they’d fit on my six bookshelves.  I own more bookshelves than dining room chairs.  I’m not sure this says anything good about my priorities.  I had to cull. 

If you're being forced by circumstances to reduce your book collection, I'm sorry.  And here's a handy, book-by-book flow chart to help you out!

How do you decide which books to keep?

In Defense of Language

I wrote a lot of bad poetry in college.  As part of this literary rite of passage, I went to a handful of poetry readings hosted by the English department, and at one of these, during the question-and-answer period, the poet on deck said the following when asked what advice he had for aspiring poets:  “Just sit down see and what you can do with the language.”

Until that moment, I hadn’t really grasped what language is.  A lifetime of schooling didn’t teach me that language isn’t just a set of vocabulary and usage rules:  It’s both tool-kit and rule-book, enabling and constraining, frustratingly insufficient and transcendently beautiful.  We struggle to express ourselves within its framework, but it never stays still.  It mutates constantly, and even words we thought we knew shift in meaning with every new reader and every fresh reading.

The more I use language for everything from text messages to novels, the more I’m struck by what a miraculous and versatile thing it is.  Which is why I’ve been dismayed by a few conversations I’ve been reading on a handful of popular blog posts discussing the quality of certain books.  There’s a recurring theme that it “shouldn’t matter” if a writer uses proper grammar or makes good decisions about words as long as “the story is good.” 

I understand the premise that in a novel, it’s the story that matters.  And if a bunch of misplaced modifiers and faulty parallelisms bug me, I don’t have to read it.  The trouble is, the misuse of language doesn’t just screw up a single story.  It has a reflexive effect on language itself.  A writer who uses words carelessly chips away at the integrity of our man-made, culturally negotiated system of expression, and that definitely, absolutely matters.

All of us who use language have the power to change it.  If enough of us adopt new slang or use new rules, those elements will be assimilated.  I love this about language.  I love that we can create new words and expressions that convey emotion and meaning (“jump the shark,” the verbification of “Google”).  But a writer is not just a consumer of language.  A writer is a caretaker.  A text to my mom about my new pair of black suede slouch boots (OMG so CUTE u gotta c them!) doesn’t have nearly as much power as a book meant to be read by the public.  People are gonna read that story, and it’s going to influence them, however subtly and imperceptibly.  Using words carelessly is like leaving soda cans on the ground at Yosemite.  It’s offensive when everyday visitors do it.  When the park rangers do it, it’s destructive.

Misusing language blurs the boundaries and crushes the nuances we could have used to do something interesting and fresh.  A new word creates a sharp, startling, useful new image (unibrow, agritourism), but a misused word just gets conflated with other words.  Take my (admittedly nit-picky) pet peeve: comprise.  Many folks use “comprise” just like they use “compose,” when in fact its meaning is closer to “embrace” or “enclose.”  To borrow Strunk & White’s illustration from The Elements of Style: a zoo comprises animals; it is not comprised of animals.  I see “comprise” misapplied so often, I think it’s probably already lost.  Just one more precision tool turned into a blunt object.

God knows I’ve been guilty of some pretty appalling abuses of language (see above: bad poetry), but I try to treat it like the commonly held commodity it is.  I don’t think that means we can’t take liberties to get our points across.  Taking risks, breaking rules, trying new things—that’s part of how language evolves, and that’s a good thing.  It’s great that language can change to accommodate the pressures applied to it by culture.  It just shouldn’t change because we’re too lazy or careless to use it well.