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Inspiration

• When Dreams Become Expectations [Nathan Bransford - Literary Agent] Don't let your dreams float too far from reality.
• T3 - Types of Grief, Part 1 [The Character Therapist] LOVE these posts! Thanks for the insight.
• Khaled Hosseini likes to read a few lines from a favourite novel before he starts to write [Inkygirl.com: Daily Diversions For Writers - by Debbie Ridpath Ohi] Great way to stay REALLY humble :D.
• A Bestseller's Rejection Story [Dystel & Goderich Literary Management] Rejection to bestseller- Tatiana de Rosnay.
• You Tell Me: Have You Faced Writer Burnout? How Do You Escape It? [Nathan Bransford - Literary Agent] Need to vent? Recharge? Find solutions? Tell @NathanBransford or see what others have to say.
• 7 Ways to Avoid Burn Out [.W.I.P. It] Tricks to keep yourself motivated.
• 7 Things I've Learned So Far, by Thomas W. Young [Guide to Literary Agents] Writing lessons from military aviation.
• The First One Is Only Practice [The Sharp Angle] Your first novel may never see print, but it teaches you to write the next.
• The Bride’s Guide to Manuscript Monogamy [Write It Sideways] Keep writing and resist the temptation to stray.
• How to get more of your writing time. [Angels and Demons and Portals. Oh My!] Sit down at least an hour a day. Write, don't edit. Plan on multiple drafts, so don't worry about the first one.
• Are Writing Routines Important to Success? [Author, Jody Hedlund] A writing routine can keep your dream on track.
• Unconscious Competence [How to Plan, Write, and Develop a Book] Abraham Maslow's famous theory on how people learn and how it applies to writing.
• The Hunger Games: Why Is It Such A Fantastic Series And Lessons For Writers [The Creative Penn] What makes the series great and what we can learn as writers.

Craft of Writing

• Symbolism Thesaurus: Unity [The Bookshelf Muse] Using symbols to foreshadow unity.
• Plot and Predictability [Ingrid's Notes] Words of wisdom from Gail Carson Levine.
• Before You Write a Single Word: Develop a Reader Profile [There Are No Rules] Identify what your reader wants.
• Natalie Aguirre said, on 9/17/2010 3:39:00 AM
  

  Great list of links. I loved Literary Rambles' word count post. I've been obsessed with the issue lately as I try to figure out the proper word count for my middle grade fantasy. It really helped.

  Christine Fonseca said, on 9/17/2010 4:51:00 AM
  

  An AMAZING list list week! THANKS

  Renae said, on 9/17/2010 5:18:00 AM
  

  What a great list! Thanks!

  Stina Lindenblatt said, on 9/17/2010 5:33:00 AM
  

  Great list as always. Wow, what a lot of giveaways. :D

  salarsenッ said, on 9/17/2010 5:46:00 AM
  

  Craft of writing has some real good ones! Thanks.

  Andrea Mack said, on 9/17/2010 5:47:00 AM
  

  Wow - your list is great. Now I have lots to read this weekend.

  Buffy Andrews said, on 9/17/2010 6:30:00 AM
  

  You girls always do an amazing job. Thank you for all your hard work, dedication and passion. You're the best! Have a super weekend. Blessings, Buffy

  Carol Riggs said, on 9/17/2010 7:40:00 AM
  

  Thanks again for a great list--still plowing through it, but I did like A. Victoria Nixon's 5 Ways to Make Your Novel's Climax Unforgettable!

  Angela Ackerman said, on 9/17/2010 7:44:00 AM
  

  Ohh, lots of good character ones this week. Thanks for gathering them and for including my post on unity too, of course!
  
  Angela @ The Bookshelf Muse

  Carol Riggs said, on 9/17/2010 7:49:00 AM
  

  Heeeey! Thanks also for including the Goober Writers Anonymous over at Emily White's blog! with the post of my excruciating-writer-mistake tale.
  
  I'm glad more writers may read that, so they WON'T do what I did! If it helps anyone become published, that would be way cool.

  Belle said, on 9/17/2010 9:19:00 AM
  

  Fabulous list! I'll be busy today, I see :)

  Bekah said, on 9/17/2010 10:34:00 AM
  

  Aww- thanks again for including me : ) I check every Friday and some how manage to lose myself in these wonderful posts. Thanks for doing this

  Julie Musil said, on 9/17/2010 11:53:00 AM
  

  Ta da! Thanks for the list!

  Julie Hedlund said, on 9/17/2010 12:09:00 PM
  

  Hey guys,
  
  Thanks (as always) for your awesome list. I'm almost amazed at how much gold you dig up.
  
  Just wanted to throw the post I wrote on the Perfect Pitch in there. It has lots and lots of links to other resources on pitching:
  
  http://writeupmylife.com/2010/09/15/perfect-pitch/
  
  Have a great weekend!

  Elana Johnson said, on 9/17/2010 12:39:00 PM
  

  Again, you astound me with your awesomeness. Thank you so much for all you do for the KidLit community! I can't imagine this place without you. *hugs* <3 <3

  Adventures in Children's Publishing said, on 9/17/2010 4:05:00 PM
  

  Thanks, everyone for all your kind words! Marissa and I love doing this and you make it fun. And Elana? OMG, the shoe is SO on the other foot!!!
  
  Martina

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Lin: What mistakes did you see.

Allyn: First-person narratives in picture books, and rhyme that's off. Picture books that are on themes that have been done so many times that they wouldn't be salable. (Read books, buy books, go to bookstores, she advises.)

Ari: Manuscripts that started in the middle of a scene.

Wendy: Pages that seemed crammed with information in the beginning. A lack of awareness of the marketplace and what's working

--POSTED BY ALICE

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Lin: What did you see today?

Allyn: I didn't ask to buy anything today. I did ask everyone who sat at my table to send me something, but that thing might not be the thing we talked about today. Everyone should go home and think about that.

Ari: I got a lot out of being in a critique group and hearing the comments of the writers who brought up things I didn't think of. It just goes to show that every editor is going to thing a little differently about your work.

Lin: What advice would you offer writers on using the comments they got today?

Wendy: Go home and think about the comments you got today and decide what resonates with you. If you're consistently getting the same feedback, those may be the things you should concentrate on.

Ari: There's always a lot of negotiating between and editor and a writer. Think about the comments you got and if you don't think they'll work for your story, think of another way to solve them.

--POSTED BY ALICE

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Lin Oliver is moderating the post-intensives panel on what to do post-critique.

Panelists include:

• Allyn Johnston, Beach Lane Books
• Wendy Loggia, Random House
• Ari Lewin, Hyperion

Stay tuned...

--POSTED BY ALICE

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... just got intense!



--POSTED BY ALICE POPE

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Aaron: Recounting advice from Little, Brown editor Jennifer Hunt. An editor is like that really good friend who things you have a beautiful smile, but you have a little spinach in your teeth.

Nancy: We do want to help make that smile beautiful. Our feedback is always about making your work better. It's helpful to point out things like did the dialog sound authentic, is there a character that grabbed you, etc.

Courtney: Today everybody in the room's job is to see the spinach in your teeth. Use the time to talk about the spinach and figure out how to fix it.

Michelle: Sometimes editors are hardest on the things that we feel have the most potential. Those may be the ones we really pick apart because we want them to be great.

Courtney: Sometimes editors might come to you at an event like and say they see potential in your manuscript but it still needs work. If I see something in your writing and offer to work with you to get it in shape for acquisitions, take advantage of that. At that point, all I can promise you is my time, but I'm not going to take time to work with a writer on something that I don't think has that potential.

--POSTED BY ALICE

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Nancy: We're looking at manuscripts a puzzles and trying to figure out the best way to make everything come together, so we focus on the parts that aren't working so the parts that are can be even better.

Aaron: When you come to something that needs to addressed, what's the best way to go about looking for solutions?

Michelle: That's a take-home. One don't solve things in 12 minutes. Part of my job I love is when I give a note to an author, and they run with it. You have to take notes and figure out how to make it work for you.

Courtney: This might be the first time you're getting professional feedback. Every agent or editor is different and will offer different feedback, but we're all going to point out the problem and things that feel off to us. You're the writer--it's your job to fix it. For us, what we're seeing is a first draft to us.


--POSTED BY ALICE

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SCBWI's own Aaron Hartzler (who looks dashing is his bow-tie) is moderating the kick-off panel of the Annual Winter Conference Writers' Intensive on taking feedback on your work. The editor panelists include:

• Courtney Bangiolatti, Simon & Schuster
• Nancy Conescu, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
  
• Michelle Nagler, Bloomsbury

Aaron: What works and what doesn't?

Courtney: Have a pen in your hand, write down comments, and really consider what both editors and agents have to say as well as your writer peers. Remember, we do this for a living. We want to make your manuscript better.

Aaron: What are you looking for as you start reading and giving feedback?

Nancy: You're looking for those sentences that grab you and good character. Be receptive to the feedback whether you agree with it or not. Really things about what editors and peers are saying. Focus on listening.

Michelle: Write down comments. Try really hard not to be dismissive. Put yourself in your critiquers shoes. We read and evaluate manuscripts constantly, considering not just whether your writing is good, but whether it's salable, has an audience.

--POSTED BY ALICE

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A few of Holly’s critique group tips:

• Achieve a balance between work and social—have fun but get the job done (says one attendee). Just don’t let the social take over.
• A critique group shouldn’t be scary or intimidating.
• In critiquing you have to be generous and willing to give away good ideas, but also work to find the right idea that works for your critique partners. You will inevitably influence each other, consciously or not.
• Everyone comes to groups with different strengths and it’s great to cultivate those strengths and use different critique partners for different things.
• You may be in groups where member have varying degrees of success. It can be hard as relationships have to adjust to this.
• Your job as a critique partner is helping make your partner write the story they want to tell.

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Fantasy author Holly Black (The Spiderwick Chronicles) wanted to do a session on critiquing because she feels she wouldn’t be an author today if it wasn’t for her critique partners.

By show of hands, about half of room is in critique groups. Holly is talking about the difference between critique groups and critique partners. Her critique group meets to go over a finished draft of a novel. (The meet 3 or 4 times a year.) She relies on her critique partners on a more day-to-day basis with work-in-progress issues.

Your critique group doesn’t have to necessarily write exactly what you like, but they should have the same taste in book—otherwise they won’t get you, Holly says. You really have to love each other’s writing or you won’t work as critique partners.

Holly often feels like she’s writing for her critique partners—they’re the audience she knows.

She ways there’s no one “in charge” of her critique group. “Our group is chaotic. We meet and we have no pattern to what we do.” (Note: Holly mentioned that sometimes the problem with critique groups is that you start out with everyone being equal, but when problems arise, there’s no “one charge” to deal with it, then people leave or groups splinter off.)

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Thanks to those who answered my writing critique group survey. Here are some of your answers:

Jenna writes:

I’m not part of a “critique group” per se, but I am part of an awesome site called the Writer’s Draft. We post excerpts for critique, rant about problems, and share ideas. Et cetera. It’s awesome. It’s really helpful.

Katherine writes:

I’ve joined a few critique groups, both on-line and off-line (I even started a couple), and have had a rotten time getting people to take it seriously enough to commit to it. It’s great that you were able to find a group through your genre/intended audience — anyone know of other groups set up along those lines?

Becky Levine writes:

I’ve belonged to critique groups for nearly 15 years and couldn’t/wouldn’t be writing without them. They’re my soapbox–the exciting thing is I just got a contract to write a book about critiquing for Writer’s Digest, so now I get to put all my strong feelings into print. AND run those words by the critique group, of course.

I think the important thing is not to settle for a group that isn’t working–if it has potential really try to make the relationships and the timing, etc work, and educate each other about how to critique. If the group just isn’t going to fly, move on–with tact, but go. Find another one. My groups have evolved a lot over the past years–as some get published and just don’t have time to do a few chapters every couple of weeks and as we switch genres, etc.

It can be tricky, but I truly believe it’s worth it.

Congrats on the book, Becky!

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Comic above available as a greeting card.

Sent off my manuscript yesterday. Before printing it, I revamped the first few chapters. Yes, again. I’ve run the opening past two writing critique groups and both had the same comments, so I figured they must have a point. Over the years I’ve tried about half a dozen online critique groups but up to now, none have been a particularly good fit for one reason or another. Or they’ve been a good fit but the group fizzled.

I’m pretty happy with my current critique group, which I found through the SCBWI site. We’re all working on fiction for the middle grade - YA level; none of us have had book-length fiction published yet but most have been published in magazines or genres other than MG/YA. It’s been remarkably tough finding a group whose writing level, focus, and critiquing philosophy is similar to mine.

We critique about 5,000 words a week. It’s time-consuming, to be sure, but I’ve found that I learn almost as much from critiquing other people as I do being critiqued.

What about the rest of you? How many of you are currently in a critique group, online or offline? Any tips for those who are still looking for the right critique group?

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The Guardian newspaper has yet again decided to produce a series of fab inserts specially designed for me. It's a seven-day How To Write series, which isn't as naff as it sounds. Today's insert is How to Write Comedy with an introduction by Catherine Tate, comedian and one time companion of the Time Lord.

I was supposed to be working on some fresh material for my new novel but I just had to blog about Catherine Tate's working process that incorporates procrastination just because my readers in South Africa are unlikely to be getting the How to Write insert (except of course, this being the digital age, you can read the whole article in the online Guardian).

'Writing" always means "not writing" to me, because I will do anything to put it off.

I think this is mainly because writing anything down and then handing it over to a third party — especially in comedy — is such an exposing act that you naturally want to delay the process.

Also, the control required to get ideas out of my head and into some tangible form that I can present to others doesn't come easily to me. I will quite simply do anything other than sit down in front of a blank screen and begin.

So guys, we procrastinators are in stellar company.

But that is not the point of this article. I will quickly come to the point so that I can get on with procrastinating over my writing.

At the end of the piece, Catherine Tate offers up three bits of advice and I thought, hey, it would be so easy to apply these to writing for children (which I suspect is a lot like writing comedy, but I haven't read the rest of the Comedy insert yet so I can't tell you).

Catherine Tate: Trust yourself. You have to start with what you think is funny before you can have the confidence to write to anyone else's brief.

NFTS: Start with your own idea and then work on it from there. Don't go copying what seems to be hot at the moment (Chick Lit and Vampires according to BrubakerFord, in my previous post), don't do a comic diary just because Diary of a Wimpy Kid has been so successful (although I am sorely tempted), be yourself.

Catherine Tate: Give a gag three chances to work, if after three (separate) attempts they're still not laughing, bin it. It's not them. It's you.

NFTS: Be clear-eyed about reader feedback/critiques. If three trusted readers concur on a problem, well, don't bin it ... but accept that you've got to do something about it. It took me a long time to take my own advice about this and with my first novel, I got stuck in an endless loop of rejection and submission that only ceased when I wrote another book.

Catherine Tate: Don't take criticism personally, take from it what's useful. Apply it and move on to something better. And be brave. No one got anywhere by being too scared to open their mouth in case nobody laughed.

NFTS: Yup. Like I said before. And as for the courage thing: it's hard but no one ever got published by giving up.

Btw: NFTS means Notes from the Slushpile. I got tired typing.

And before I go back to work, here is my favourite Catherine Tate sketch in which teenage scourge Lauren "Am I bovvered?" Cooper quotes Shakespeare to an English teacher (played of course by David Tennant aka Dr Who).


P.S. Check out this t-shirt in my shop -that- never- makes- any- money- because-the- Spreadshirt- markup- is- so- high.

It says "Done Procrastinating" in front. On the back it says "Later"

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So, you’ve mastered your anxiety and have placed your manuscript into the crittery waters of a new critique group. You wait, compulsively checking your inbox for the feedback to roll in. You’re excited, but a little scared, too. Will they laugh-out-loud where they’re supposed to, weep at the sheer brilliance of a certain plot twist, get sucked in by your vivid description? Ping. In comes a

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In my critique group there are quite a few of us revising finished manuscripts.

It’s a thrilling process, revisiting your words and discovering that you can recharge a scene in ways you couldn’t imagine the last time you read the manuscript.

But it’s also a terrifying thing.

One little edit throws up a thousand edits. Injecting nuance to a previously two dimensional character might mean weeks of re-imagining all the scenes the character features in.

Suddenly the revision is not just a quick edit but a total rewrite.

One novelist friend wrote me in an email:

I’m doing really well. The only thing is it's getting so I’m afraid I’m going to have to rewrite the whole novel!

What to do?

I found the answer when I was half-watching a movie in the wee hours while contemplating my manuscript.

The film was Wonder Boys (2000), featuring Michael Douglas (pictured) as former award-winning novelist Grady Tripp who we are led to believe is suffering from writer’s block. Except he isn’t. The real problem is that he can’t stop writing – and the script has hit an unpublishable 2,000 plus single-spaced pages. His creative writing student Hannah (played by Katie Holmes) reads the tome and delivers the following critique:

Grady, you know how in class you are always telling us that writers make choices? And even though your book is really beautiful, I mean amazingly beautiful ... at times it’s ... uh ... very detailed. You know, the genaeologies of everybody’s horses and dental records and so on. And I could be wrong but it sort of reads in places like you didn’t make any choices. At all.

What to do?

Make choices.

You’ve decided to edit your book.

So do it.

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In an earlier incarnation as a young playwright, literary editor Sol Stein went on a writing fellowship in which he got to work with American theatre icon Thornton Wilder.

Thornton Wilder taught me ... the necessity of sitting through bad plays, to witness coughing and squirming in the audience, to have ears up like a rabbit to catch what didn't work, to observe how little tolerance an audience has for a mishap, ten seconds of boredom breaking an hour-long spell.

Solutions for Writers, Sol Stein, 1995

To this day, Stein urges his writing students

Once they have begun to master the craft, to read a few chapters of John Grisham's The Firm, or some other transient bestseller, to see what they can learn from the mistakes of writers who don't heed the precise meanings of the words they use. they also learn to read the work of literary prize-winners to detect the rare uncaught error in craft. What they are doing is perfecting their editorial eye and their self-editing talent, learning to read as a writer.

Critique groups perform this service for us. At critique groups we are learning not just to fix our work but to develop an instinctive ability to edit our own writing, the ability to see our work without the rose-tinted spectacles of a creator. We are "perfecting our editorial eye".

I wish someone told me that six years ago when I started writing. I made the mistake of listening to the advice of a (published) close friend:

Don't show your work to anyone. It will put you off writing.

But knowing what I know now, those two years of not showing my work to anybody was a complete waste of time. The fact is, writers who are put off by criticism are not cut out for publication. One only has to read the reader reviews on Amazon to realise that this writing business is not for the thin-skinned.

As Aussie Fantasy Author Ian Irvine says in his piece The Truth About Publishing:

Anyone who can be discouraged from writing should be.

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To kick-off our discussion of The Secret Agent John Lyon, editor of the OUP volume, and Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol, has reflected on what it was like to introduce this book right after the events of September 11, 2001. (more…)

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