The Week of the Critique

I’ve nearly overwhelmed myself, but I’m plowing through. This is the official “Week of the Critique” for me.

Monday night in my novel writing workshop, I was critiqued by the group and it was my first time. It was a very productive and helpful session. The group talked about my first chapter for about 20-25 minutes and then I got ten very detailed written critiques. I was really impressed with how thorough and how thoughtful all of the critiques were. The best part of getting so much feedback is that I can easily read through each of the ten write ups and find consensus about things that did and didn't work for these readers.

It was a very positive experience and I feel fortunate to have such a great group of people in my workshop. One of the other writers compared the experience to a focus group, and it really was. It was interesting to sit quietly while people debated aspects of character, or discussed interpretations of relationships and dialogue. Charles Gramlich at Razored Zen posted the other day about an article he’s planning to write about the differences between online and actual writing groups. I learned Monday that it’s a huge benefit to listen to several people discussing the work, because many of the things discussed didn’t necessarily come across in the written critiques. This tends to apply to situations where people have made assumptions and find that other readers didn't interpret what they read in the same way.

I’d also gotten a detailed written critique the day before from another friend, so I have a total of eleven critiques of my first thirteen pages!

But now it’s payback time. I need to critique a piece for our next session on Monday, but before that, I have to finish critiquing eight excerpts for a conference hosted by the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers this weekend. I’m auditing an agent workshop on Friday afternoon, so the eight actual participants will get critiqued by each other, the agent and five auditors.

I found it interesting that without a specific format for the critiques, everyone does his or her own thing. All of the pages had writing on them, some people chose to write summaries on the backs of pages and some typed up comments in their own format, broken down into categories.

For the sake of standardization, I decided to use the form that one of my critiquers used for my feedback and it seems to be working well. The eight excerpts I’m reading are a really mixed bag. There is one humorous piece, set in post WWII New York City, a historical peace that spans a lifetime, starting in the Ante-Bellum south, there is a modern YA tale with a premise based on technology and computer hacking, a cozy mystery, a coming of age, a historical romance, a thriller, and an action-adventure. Each also has a one page synopsis and it’s interesting to note the differences. One synopsis left me flat, but the excerpt is written extremely well. One synopsis is really good, but the excerpt wasn’t nearly as promising as the synopsis and the rest all fall all over the map. I can't imagine how agents deal with reading and assessing all the queries they get.

The weekend starts on Friday with the start of the Colorado Gold Conference, hosted by the RMFW. I registered for it months ago, so I didn't know it would coincide with The Lighthouse Writers Workshop Tobias Wolff events, which include two workshops and a fund raising dinner! I double booked myself and will have to make choices between sessions and events all weekend and dash between venues all over Denver.

Monday night I’ll be back in workshop, detailed critique in hand.

Whew! I’m looking forward to the weekend, but I’ll be relieved when all of my critiquing duties are behind me for another week.

For those of you who have had experiences on both sides of the critique, what are your thoughts about giving and receiving feedback?

I Need a Little Help From My Friends

Several months ago, I registered for a conference and one of the sessions I signed up to audit is with a prominent literary agent. The actual registrants are allowed to submit pages to the agent and during the workshop; she will provide feedback to the writers. According to the package I received in the mail today, the writers may even be asked (or allowed – it’s not too clear) to read from their work.

Although I don’t have a finished manuscript and therefore, won’t be submitting pages, I thought it would be an interesting experience to see how the other writers fare and to observe candid feedback from an agent, up close and personal.

What wasn’t clear when I registered for this session was that the attendees (including those of us just auditing), would be provided the same excerpts that the agent will receive and we’d be asked to critique them.

I got my package today and there are eight synopses with ten page excerpts each. While I feel fairly comfortable offering critique and noting things that I think the writers have done well as well as noting things that could be stronger, I have one excerpt that has me a little stumped.

These are all people I don’t know – that’s actually helpful. I have the feeling that one of the submissions may have been written by an adolescent. There are problems. There are significant problems, up to and including very poor grammar and many, many misspelled words. I’m not sure what to do with this. To make note of every mistake feels cruel, but this person has paid to attend this conference and paid an additional fee for this critique from a New York agent. I’m inclined to make some general notes and mention grammar and spelling as an issue to work on, instead of marking up the manuscript completely.

Ideas?

Suggestions?

Please?

Little Children

Scott and I watched the movie Little Children without knowing anything beyond what the rental said on the back of the box. From the opening moments of the movie it's clear the movie is a novel adaptation. A disembodied narrator is with us for most of the story. As the film opens we see Sarah, played by Kate Winslet with her three year old daughter and three other suburban mothers and their children in a playground setting. I assume it’s being narrated from Sarah’s point of view. Several minutes later, the point of view switches to Brad, a stay at home dad referred to by the three women who are regulars at the playground as “The Prom King”. I then assume the story is being told from the omniscient point of view, simply because the ethereal male narrator’s voice is so god-like and detached. I realize soon afterward that the narrator speaks only from the point of view of two of the many characters.

I can’t recall ever seeing a movie narrated so heavily throughout and I can't think of any narrated from multiple points of view. It took me slightly off guard initially, but it was very effective. When I read a novel told from multiple points of view, I tend to “hear” a different voice for each character.

The story was so interesting, the characters – and there were quite a few -- so well developed and the many major conflicts were so elegantly wrapped up that I was interested in finding out more about the author, Tom Perrotta and the book. I found out that in addition to writing Little Children, he wrote Election, which was also adapted to film in 1999. In all he’s written six novels, his newest, The Abstinence Teacher due to be published in October. He’s also written a number of short stories and essays.

I found an interview with Tom Perrotta that was done prior to the film adaptation of Little Children in Post Road Magazine – incidentally, the same literary magazine where P. Amy MacKinnon of The Writers Group is a fiction slush reader. In the Post Road piece, Tom Perrotta answers 20 Questions related to writing and has some pretty interesting answers.

When the movie finished, I realized that for the last few years, no matter what the medium, whether it’s a novel, a movie, a short story or even a television show, I find myself dissecting stories -- the good ones -- and noticing technique in a great deal of detail. A couple of years ago, Scott and another painter were having a spirited discussion about a particular group of paintings in an art magazine. I was a little amused and thought that as an art lover, but not a painter I could derive more enjoyment from artwork than they could because they were incapable of not analyzing the technique and I didn’t know enough to do it. I went to the ballet several years ago and had a similar experience. I knew enough about ballet from a couple of humbling years as a beginning adult student to appreciate how incredibly difficult even the simplest things are, but not enough experience to notice small mistakes in particularly difficult moves. I overheard two young women behind me making a big deal about something that had happened right before my eyes during a lift that was apparently near-catastrophic, but the dancer recovered and only the most discerning eyes in the audience ever knew the difference. I was watching and I didn’t.

Does experiencing art of any kind with a critical eye add or detract from your enjoyment of it? Does the analysis take us out of the experience? How do you view art, literature, dance, music or other art forms when you have an intimate understanding of them? Once you've immersed yourself in an art form, can you ever give your inner critic the day off?