Loving Criticism

We Want Our Work To Be Loved

We’re authors. Of course we want our work to be loved. Therefore, anything that seems like criticism shrinks our ego to the size of our withered thymus gland. We crumple into ourselves, hang the “Out to Lunch” sign on our front door, and mourn.

Criticism is the Most Loving Thing for Your Work

If we want our work to shine, we must accept and react to criticism. We can’t be expected to see everything that could be wrong with our writing; we’ve lived with it for so long it makes sense in our minds. We can’t be the reader who sees it for the first time.

Criticism has a bad name, because we think of it only in its most negative sense: the harmful, useless “This book sucks”. But we should make room in our lives for the more constructive “This doesn’t work”, “I don’t understand,” and “This frustrates me” as well as the “This works great”, “This makes me laugh”, and “I really enjoyed this”.

Different Levels of Critique

In writing, we can get critiques at several levels. We may not need all these levels for smaller works, but novels and novellas would benefit from all these levels. These are the most usual levels:
Developmental edit: Exploring shape and meaning
The developmental editor deals with the readability and strength of the work. Character development, theme, and plot fall into the dev editor’s responsibility.
Line edit/Copy edit: Ensuring readability and accuracy
The titles “copy edit” and “line edit” are used interchangeably. Their function is to make sure sentences are grammatically correct and words spelled right. They also look at whether the individual sentences make sense.
Beta readers: Conveying the reader’s experience
Beta readers are casual readers who read and comment on the book that has gone through developmental and line edits. They convey the reader’s experience of the book. In a way, they are the freshest set of eyes because they don’t have the expertise one expects from editors.

Takeaway
If we invite critique into our writing process, then the criticism happens in a way that we can respond to it. Then, when the random critic decides they don’t like the book, we know we’ve done our best. We may not love criticism, but we can at least value it.

If you have any favorite “oopsies” in your works, found by an editor, please let me know in the comments here.

Moving on to the next edit

Gaia’s Hands is a done book. I will probably send it out for queries after the first of the year. For now, I want it to rest on my computer and I want to not be obsessed with it for a while.

Now to move on to edit Whose Hearts are Mountains. I don’t have a lot to go by, as my dev editor is on leave. But what I have is daunting — not enough action in the beginning. I thought I had enough action in the beginning, but now I have to figure out how to put in more.

I used to be horrible in receiving criticism. Now I’m humble and take it with the belief that it will make my writing better. I’ve learned a lot, and I’m always learning more.

I hope it’s making me better. I hope it’s making me good enough to be published.

Feedback and Creativity

This is a quick entry before I go off to make volunteers look like victims:

Last night at the Missouri Hope (disaster exercise) training, we discussed the model of learning we use in the exercise: Put the team into an unique and overwhelming situation, step aside to see how they handle it, and advise when they get stuck.

The key, however, is that how you give the feedback is vitally important, because insensitive feedback can create problems in the disaster scenario and, worse, hinder learning and the willingness to develop further.

For example, “You could do better” is content-free, offering a judgement without supplying any advice.

Obviously, “That was a stupid thing to do” merely insults the learner and suggests they may as well not try again.

“That was good, but …” People ignore everything before the word “but”, so it sounds much like #1 above.

“Don’t do that?” Just don’t do that.

Good critiques inform the client factually of corrective actions. “It would work better here if you would …” or “Think about …”

The training session had me reminiscing to that moment in my college poetry class where I quit being creative for many years: The time my poetry professor called one of my poems “greeting-card trash”. Now that I’m older, I realize that not even professors are infallible, and many are just plain mean and ugly. But at age 20, I took it so hard that I didn’t let anyone read my work for years.

I still wrote, but in hiding, only lsharin my stuff in that brief stint as singer-songwriter (until I divorced my guitarist). I had lost the joy of creating, and I started my career as a professor with very little balance. I had become half of myself.

It took marrying Richard, I think, to bring me back to my creative self. The strange thing is that Richard is an aspiring writer, but doesn’t think he’s creative. He is; just not as flamboyant as I am. He loves being silly, and I think he should write children’s chapbooks with illustrations for the rest of his life. In that atmosphere, my creativity came back, because I could try new things in a safe atmosphere and use feedback to hone my skills.

When I became a writer: A bio of creativity

I started writing in third grade — poetry, it turned out. My third grade teacher, Mrs. Kuh (an unpleasant sort for the most part) taught us poetry — difficult, advanced poetry. Diamante and haiku and limericks — although we were too young for the most amusing examples of the latter form, dirty limericks.

My first poem, a haiku:

Come here, small firefly.
Let me see your glowing light
shining bright and gay.

Note the six beats in the first line where there should be five. I didn’t quite have the hang of haiku in third grade. Blessedly, I do not remember my third-grade diamante.

In fifth grade, my mother unwittingly put me up to collaborate in plagiarism. My neighbor in high school had to write a poem for Mrs. Schobert’s class, and his mom asked my mom to ask me to write a poem for him to hand in. I was scared not to comply, so I wrote him a poem. I earned an A on his poem, although Mrs. Schobert may have wondered why he wrote like a fifth grade girl.

In sixth grade, I wrote very amateurish stories about the guy I had a crush on. (He came out of the closet after graduation.)

I gave my junior high (Middle School for you youngsters) English teacher everything I wrote throughout seventh and eighth grade, because my mother didn’t seem too interested in them. At the end of junior high, she returned them to me in a folder and told me to keep writing and to work toward getting published. Thank you, Miss Myers, for giving me a goal.

In high school, I took a creative writing class with Mrs. Schobert, who didn’t recognize that my writing style looked like a high school boy’s writing of several years before. I learned the very basic basics of everything — diamante and haiku, descriptive writing, short stories, and playwriting. I wrote a short fantasy play based on a story my mother had told me about the year her family couldn’t afford a Christmas tree. The reviews in my head ran: “A heartfelt but saccharine attempt to catch the magic of Christmas.”

In college, I wrote many, many poems. Most of them related to the ups and downs of being in love. One of my exes, who broke up with me for a girl he met at a party, explained to his new girlfriend, “She wrote poems. I never understood them.” After that, I wished I could pull off the Goth look to emphasize my feeling of being misunderstood.

My college poetry class almost killed my desire to write when the published poet who taught it lauded a student for her “original” — “like a moth to the light”. On the other hand, he called my work “greeting card trash”. My poems might not have been great, but how could I have improved them from that screed? Mr. Guy Whose Name I’ve Forgotten, you created my hatred of being critiqued.

When I was in grad school, I dated a folksinger. (He hurt me badly; I kill him off in this current book I’m editing). He played a combination strum/fingerpicking style and composed beautiful, intricate pieces. He’d play around with a tune, and the following conversation would ensue.

Me: I have a work in progress that would work with that tune.

Him: How? It’s 5/4 time with syncopation!

Me: Try me …

So we composed music and performed together, and we had a fan or two and earned $2.50 busking. More importantly, I got to sing about my heartbreak and trauma and crushes and people listened. Many had their favorites — the most popular song was “World’s Worst Blues Song,” which is exactly as advertised. We married, we divorced, and I have a handful of songs I can’t perform because I can’t learn guitar and my voice (husky contralto) isn’t what it used to be. So, Adam, thank you for helping me get my words heard. Do not, under any circumstances, contact me. I’ve killed you off, after all.

I didn’t write novels until about five years ago. I couldn’t comprehend writing novels because they required an extended and gripping plot, a certain amount of continuity for many, many pages, and attention span. (I may have ADHD. Never diagnosed, but watched carefully by the school district.)

But then I fell in love with a world and its characters. I first met them, I believe I said once, by interpreting a dream, then by interrogating the dream by questioning its characters. I kept writing short stories about the same people and the same world, tracing the progression of their very strange relationship in a background of present-day spirit activity. Richard (my second and real husband) said, “You might as well write a book,” and I wrote one. And then more, because I kept getting ideas about where this world and its people were going. Thank you, Richard, for appealing to my best self, the one who dares.

I am editing that first book for perhaps the third time. That first book has always seemed problematic, and I would fix things one at a time (search for places that needed more description, search for places that needed better verbs, etc.) and I still felt dissatisfied with it. For the past few days, I’ve dug deeper. I’ve culled sections that distract from the action and added more hints a là Chekhov’s Gun. I’ve added more menace, more potential dire consequences for the protagonists and a foreshadowing into the next books in the series. I’m less shy about Josh and Jeanne’s relationship (but still just as shy about the sex. I’m not a prude, honestly, just not happy about how sex ends up on paper).

Yesterday, I felt joy at ripping this novel apart and reassembling it. Joy from editing, from improving, from making this novel solid and not tentative, making it menacing and joyous.

Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I felt like I could own the identity of “writer”.

Thank you, all of those in my past and all of you in my present, for supporting me along the way.