critique tagged posts

In Part 9, I wrote about timing as it related to conflict. But there’s another layer of the writing onion that I need to discuss: timing as it relates to revealing character. I have a feeling this is one of those things that many writers, especially new ones and “pantsers” (writers who don’t plan out their stories in advance, but instead write “by the seat of their pants”), don’t think about. I admit I hadn’t, and I wouldn’t be surprised if experienced writers, whether they outline, stitch together scenes written in random order, or pants-it, do this more subconsciously than consciously, no matter what genre they write in.

Examining whe...

“Show, don’t tell.” We writers get told that all the time. ALL the time.

The thing is, neither telling nor showing are wrong, per se. What’s “wrong” is relying on either one too much, or using one technique where the other would be more effective. This is true in character development and revelation as much as it is in any other aspect of writing. Kristen Lamb discusses this here. As a reviewer, you should be looking for whether a writer is using either of these techniques less well than they could.

Let’s take a few examples. Carol’s relationship with boyfriend Bob is everything she hoped and dreamed it would be...

One of the key things readers want to see in a story (fiction or non-fiction) is some sign of change in the characters over the course of the story—positive, we hope, but that isn’t required. The protagonist may not get what he wants by the end, or even what he deserves, but he should grow or change in some way. The same is true for the secondary characters.

Even the antagonist needs to change. She doesn’t have to see the light, realize the error of her ways, and become the good person we always knew she could be, and that she always wanted to be deep down inside...

Before I begin, a disclaimer: what follows just scratches the surface of characterization. People have written many books on creating believable characters, and I’m smart enough to know I can’t cover everything they do in one post, or even a series of them.

With that in mind, what do I mean by poor characterization? What makes it poor, and how can you as a reviewer spot it, describe it, and offer help for it to the “guilty” writer?

Good Characterization

We readers want the characters of the pieces we read to be:

• Believable...

The next eight articles are going to be about characters and characterization. Before we get started, though, I want to point you to another excellent blog post from several years ago, titled The Night the Lights Went Out in Texas, by Keith Cronin, on Writer Unboxed. This paragraph sums up so much about the enterprise of story-telling, whether in fiction or non-fiction:

“But it really comes down to the people. (I look at the sentence I just typed, and realize I instinctively chose the right word with “people.” It’s hard for me to even refer to them as mere “characters” – that’s how real they’ve become to me.)”

That says it all, doesn’t it? It’s the fundamental quest...

I need to “revise and extend” my last Critique Technique post.

Last time I wrote that things should be worse for the protagonist at the end of each section (or scene) or chapter of an article, short story, or novel than they were at the beginning. Well, that’s not entirely true. In a longer piece, and particularly in a short part of that piece, that may not be possible, or desirable.

Letting the scene’s or chapter’s protagonist make a little progress, or seem to make progress, has its benefits:

1. The reader is encouraged, and so wants to read further.
2. That progress gives the author more opportunities to make things worse for the protagonist: one step forward makes room for the two steps backward to come. (There we writers go again, being evil and devious!)
3. If the scene’s protago...

I’ve written about beginnings in the last couple of posts. For the next couple, I’ll discuss the endings of sections or scenes, chapters, and the entire piece. I’ll look at the first two here.

Articles and short stories are often divided into sections or scenes, sometimes even into chapters. Books of all kinds are almost always divided into chapters, and those chapters often have scenes within them.

Why would a chapter, article, or short story be divided into scenes? In fiction, scenes contain the action in a specific time and place, from a particular point of view, or focused on a certain character...

Last time I wrote about how the beginning of a piece is supposed to “hook” the reader, to make them have to keep reading past the first line, the first paragraph, the first page. Now we need to zoom out a little and look at the beginning of the piece as a whole. Specifically, we need to ask, “Is this the right place for the piece to begin?”

That may seem like an odd question: doesn’t an article, short story, or novel start at the beginning?

Not necessarily. You’ve probably heard that a story needs to start in medias res, a Latin phrase meaning “in the middle of things.”

Great. What things?

Things. You know. The action. The events. Which may, of course, be internal to on...

Before I begin, remember that for each of the items I’ll discuss from now on, you have four questions to ask:

• Did it happen?
• Exactly where did it happen?
• What exactly is the problem? Or what just worked really well?
• What can the author do to fix it, if something needs fixing?

OK, so what is a “hook” and how can it be weak or missing? Whatever you’re writing—fiction or non-fiction, poetry or prose—you need to catch and hold your reader’s interest: you need to hook them. And you need to do it early. How early? Well, in a poem it has to happen right away, in the first few lines, since a poem is likely to be brief. But this is true even in a longer piece...

Before we get down to the nitty-gritty details of what to critique and how to do it, I want to give you a high-level overview of what the rest of this series is going to cover. We’ll look at twelve broad categories:

• Reader response
• Beginnings and endings
• Characters and characterization
• Setting
• Plot
• Flashbacks, flash-forwards, and backstory
• Narrative and dialogue
• Pace
• Description
• General story-telling problems
• Mechanical errors
• Positive reinforcement, and
• Other topics

Whew, that’s a lot! “But wait, there’s more!” Much, much more, as you’ll see in a minute.

Positive reinforcement gets its own section because writers need positive strokes, to hear that something they wrote actua...