Critiques and feedback are invaluable for a writer. No matter how brilliant your prose, there's always at least one sentence that sounded great in your head, but is open to other interpretations when read. Such a sentence can drop the reader out of his trance, or worse, confuse the reader so badly that she simply quits reading. In my limited experience, such nitpicky items are not the primary cause of a failed story. Indeed, a good story line may transcend even marginal prose. You may have seen such stories written by very successful authors (and no, I won't offer my opinion of any names here). Usually, you tell your friends about such stories, "He's not a very good writer, but he spins one hell of a yarn."
You can use software to proof your document and likely catch better than 60% of your grammatically bad sentences, but such software is no good at the paragraph level and useless for style considerations. IIRC, Stephen King suggested that the atomic structure of stories is the paragraph not the sentence. I don't know of any software that can help you at the paragraph level. Anyway, more difficult to fix than bad grammar in a story are structural problems. Please note, that most newbies cannot afford to ignore grammar simply because they are such great story tellers. Chances are that the harried slush reader won't read past the first page of your engaging yarn: there are simply too many submissions to read without struggling through bad sentence level writing. With name recognition you might (MIGHT) get a pass on your grammar..
As an aside, because I'm primarily interested in commercial genre fiction, particularly speculative fiction, that's my slant. If anyone finds my opinions useful for other types of fiction, well and good. Despite an undergraduate major in English literature, I don't really understand literary fiction and horror fiction makes no sense to me at all; I like mystery novels, but I don't read a lot of them, and general commercial fiction is too large a category for me to even think about. So these comments reflect only my meager experience with speculative fiction, primarily fantasy and science fiction.
First consider the observation on Marion ZImmer Bradley's Web site, wherein she describes a (speculative genre) short story: "A LIKABLE CHARACTER overcomes ALMOST INSUPERABLE ODDS and BY HIS OR HER OWN EFFORTS achieves a WORTHWHILE GOAL." You can read the rest of the discussion on her site, but this sentence suggests four necessary ingredients in a short story, which if any one fails can leave the reader dissatisfied. I can't imagine any software capable of checking these elements, much less deciding whether they produce a dramatic situation that entrances the reader. That's why you need a live reader, or readers, to offer feedback on your masterpiece.
I'm cheap. I prefer not to pay $300+ to attend workshops or a writer's conference. You may be able to get a better bargain with a fiction writing course at a local college, particularly if they have a professional writer in residence, but that poses a different kind of hassle. I'm not saying that writer's conferences aren't worth the money, I'm only saying I'm cheap. The only critique groups I've tried are online and free: Hatrack River, Critters (but Critters may ask for a yearly donation), and Baen's Universe Slush. Others may be as good or better, I don't know. I haven't tried them.
Last Episode I discussed Hatrack. Clearly the approach of allowing only the first 13 lines of a story to be critiqued wouldn't help with story structure, only with the story hook to draw in the reader. Hatrack has other critique forms also, some may be very good, some are private literary bootcamps (fee-based?). I have no experience with these others: I struggled to get a handle on the thirteen lines philosophy. I found that a useful starting place, but incomplete. I wanted feed back on an entire story.
Enter Critters. On Critters you earn the right to submit a complete story by critiquing a minimal number of other members stories. The forum offers instructions on good ways to write a critique. I found the information useful. Once you submitted a story, you were placed in the queue. Once each week, the submitted stories at the top of the queue were released for review. If you had done enough critiques, then your story would be released for review when it reached that point of the queue. In my experience, you could accomplish this once every three or four weeks. There were ways to move up in the queue, for example, by doing a very large number of critiques, or if you were a "professional" you got bumped to the top, but for most people you waited your turn. I suppose that's fine so long as you still work your day job, but I was in a hurry, I wanted faster turnover. Moreover, you'd best have a good title, a nice hook, and a short length to attract very many critiques: nothing in the rules compels anyone to read your story.
Let me say that I learned a lot about critiquing a story at Critters, and IMHO learning to critique someone else's story is the first step in learning to read and analyze your own work critically. Learning to judge my own work so that I could improve it was one of my goals for joining a group. In the course of participating at Critters, I looked up jargon that others used, and I used their comments to research information about short story structure. You could even submit a chapter or two of a novel if you wished. On Critters, I met interesting people who were generous with their time and advice. However, for me, the turn around was too slow, so I looked for another group.
I had joined and lurked about Baen Universe before trying Critters, but never got a handle on how it worked. After deciding Critters was too slow, I returned and read through the disorganized explanations in the forums until I finally saw some distinguishing characteristics between the purposes and practices of The Slush Pile, The Baen Universe Slush Pile, and the official Novel Submission Slush pile. So I decided to submit a story to Baen that had been Crittered and see what happened. Turns out, it worked more simply than I thought.
In the next Episode or two, I'll describe my experience with The Baen Universe Slush Pile.
You can use software to proof your document and likely catch better than 60% of your grammatically bad sentences, but such software is no good at the paragraph level and useless for style considerations. IIRC, Stephen King suggested that the atomic structure of stories is the paragraph not the sentence. I don't know of any software that can help you at the paragraph level. Anyway, more difficult to fix than bad grammar in a story are structural problems. Please note, that most newbies cannot afford to ignore grammar simply because they are such great story tellers. Chances are that the harried slush reader won't read past the first page of your engaging yarn: there are simply too many submissions to read without struggling through bad sentence level writing. With name recognition you might (MIGHT) get a pass on your grammar..
As an aside, because I'm primarily interested in commercial genre fiction, particularly speculative fiction, that's my slant. If anyone finds my opinions useful for other types of fiction, well and good. Despite an undergraduate major in English literature, I don't really understand literary fiction and horror fiction makes no sense to me at all; I like mystery novels, but I don't read a lot of them, and general commercial fiction is too large a category for me to even think about. So these comments reflect only my meager experience with speculative fiction, primarily fantasy and science fiction.
First consider the observation on Marion ZImmer Bradley's Web site, wherein she describes a (speculative genre) short story: "A LIKABLE CHARACTER overcomes ALMOST INSUPERABLE ODDS and BY HIS OR HER OWN EFFORTS achieves a WORTHWHILE GOAL." You can read the rest of the discussion on her site, but this sentence suggests four necessary ingredients in a short story, which if any one fails can leave the reader dissatisfied. I can't imagine any software capable of checking these elements, much less deciding whether they produce a dramatic situation that entrances the reader. That's why you need a live reader, or readers, to offer feedback on your masterpiece.
I'm cheap. I prefer not to pay $300+ to attend workshops or a writer's conference. You may be able to get a better bargain with a fiction writing course at a local college, particularly if they have a professional writer in residence, but that poses a different kind of hassle. I'm not saying that writer's conferences aren't worth the money, I'm only saying I'm cheap. The only critique groups I've tried are online and free: Hatrack River, Critters (but Critters may ask for a yearly donation), and Baen's Universe Slush. Others may be as good or better, I don't know. I haven't tried them.
Last Episode I discussed Hatrack. Clearly the approach of allowing only the first 13 lines of a story to be critiqued wouldn't help with story structure, only with the story hook to draw in the reader. Hatrack has other critique forms also, some may be very good, some are private literary bootcamps (fee-based?). I have no experience with these others: I struggled to get a handle on the thirteen lines philosophy. I found that a useful starting place, but incomplete. I wanted feed back on an entire story.
Enter Critters. On Critters you earn the right to submit a complete story by critiquing a minimal number of other members stories. The forum offers instructions on good ways to write a critique. I found the information useful. Once you submitted a story, you were placed in the queue. Once each week, the submitted stories at the top of the queue were released for review. If you had done enough critiques, then your story would be released for review when it reached that point of the queue. In my experience, you could accomplish this once every three or four weeks. There were ways to move up in the queue, for example, by doing a very large number of critiques, or if you were a "professional" you got bumped to the top, but for most people you waited your turn. I suppose that's fine so long as you still work your day job, but I was in a hurry, I wanted faster turnover. Moreover, you'd best have a good title, a nice hook, and a short length to attract very many critiques: nothing in the rules compels anyone to read your story.
Let me say that I learned a lot about critiquing a story at Critters, and IMHO learning to critique someone else's story is the first step in learning to read and analyze your own work critically. Learning to judge my own work so that I could improve it was one of my goals for joining a group. In the course of participating at Critters, I looked up jargon that others used, and I used their comments to research information about short story structure. You could even submit a chapter or two of a novel if you wished. On Critters, I met interesting people who were generous with their time and advice. However, for me, the turn around was too slow, so I looked for another group.
I had joined and lurked about Baen Universe before trying Critters, but never got a handle on how it worked. After deciding Critters was too slow, I returned and read through the disorganized explanations in the forums until I finally saw some distinguishing characteristics between the purposes and practices of The Slush Pile, The Baen Universe Slush Pile, and the official Novel Submission Slush pile. So I decided to submit a story to Baen that had been Crittered and see what happened. Turns out, it worked more simply than I thought.
In the next Episode or two, I'll describe my experience with The Baen Universe Slush Pile.
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