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Here’s a Table of Contents of all of the Critique Technique posts to make it easier to go directly to the post you want to read.

Introductory Posts

Part 1: Critique, Technique, and Procedure

Part 1A: The Critiquer’s Mind

Part 1B: Life on the Other Side of the Critique

Part 2: Series Overview

Reader Response

Part 3: How Do You Feel?

Part 3.5: Authorial Intentions and Tracking Your Own Responses

Beginnings and Endings

Part 5: Weak or Missing Hook

Part 6: The Wrong Beginning

Part 7: Scene and Chapter Endings

Part 8: Story Endings

Characterization

Part 9: Characters and Conflict

Part 10: Poor Characterization

Part 11: Lack of Character Development

Part 12: Showing and Telling in Character Development

Part 13: Timing the Reveal

Pa...

Perhaps you remember this exchange from the movie Amadeus:

Emperor Joseph II: “My dear, young man, don’t take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It’s quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that’s all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.”

Mozart: “Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?”[1]

Wow. Talk about a perfect response to an ignorant critic—never mind that the critic happened to be an Emperor! I guess that would qualify as a 3-star review. (It’s worth noting that a few lines earlier, the orchestra’s conductor had set the Emperor up by feeding him that criticism. Talk about helping throw someone under the bus! But I digress….)

The truth is, it is possible to have too mu...

Painters have a lot of different tools at their disposal to create an image: oils, watercolors, acrylics, computer graphics. Photographers have light, composition, angle, framing, the capabilities of their camera and film or electronics, and of course Photoshop® and its cousins. Sculptors have stone, wood, found objects, metal, even sand.

We writers have words—hundreds of thousands of them in the English language alone—so there should never be a problem with creating a clear image, right?

Alas, we know that’s not true. It’s not how many or how few tools we have at our disposal, it’s how we use them that matters...

The flip side of providing vague or insufficient setting detail is providing too much. Drowning the reader in the minutia of a setting not only kills the momentum of the story, it causes readers to lose track of the story. When they do that, they lose interest. For the lucky author, the reader will just skip ahead—a few times.

Brace Yourself

But for the unlucky author, or the one who insists on writing a description like this—deep breath—“the three green sateen ribbons on the head of the second Pekinese from the left, the one with the ghost-grey patch of fur on its back that looks just like a giraffe if you look at it from the right rear, which is hard to do because the dog insists on spinning around—always clockwise,...

Last time I wrote about authors not providing setting information at all, or not providing it soon enough. Not providing enough detail about the setting is a similar problem. Next time we’ll go to the other extreme and discuss providing too much information.

It’s easy for an author to fall into the vagueness trap: after all, his mind’s eye sees the setting the characters are in. That knowledge becomes so ingrained that he can forget the reader isn’t right there with him: she doesn’t see what he sees, know what he knows, etc. In the end, details get left out, even when they’re new and important, and the poor reader becomes a member of the Fugawi Tribe. (See Part 18 for an explanation of who they are.)

Setting detail...

This is the first of three posts on setting.

Remember that old TV show, “Lost In Space”? Neither do I, really, but that’s OK. The title’s the important thing. I used to be in the Air Force, and there was a joke among us aviators that navigators were members of the Fugawi Tribe. (This was true for Naval aviators, too.)

“Why is that?” you ask.

“Because,” I reply, “you could often find them huddled over their paper charts [this was back in the day—today they huddle over GPS displays, mostly] with their compasses and protractors and special rulers and rotary slide rules...