Blogger: Mary Keeley
Do you recall the one or two Aha! moments in your writing journey in which you personally received stellar advice or feedback that was life changing for your WIP? For your craft? For your career as an author?
These questions assume that you belong to a challenging critique group with one or more partners who are further into in their craft, perhaps already published. Or that you have attended writers conferences and paid for written critiques of your book by professional editors. Or it could have been in a brainstorming session with your agent, who guided your focus in a new direction that was a better match for you.
Or maybe it wasn’t anyone in the publishing world at all, but rather someone close to you whose wisdom reshaped your perspective on your writing. Maybe God spoke to you through a message or in your personal Bible reading. It’s okay to share that as well.
Keep the conversation focused on the world of writing and the publishing industry. To help you jump start your memory recall, advice for your novel may involve story arc, emotional arc, spiritual arc and how to weave them into your plot, good advice for pacing in your story, development of your characters, or how to correct POV issues, and so on. Advice for non-fiction writers may involve suggestions to grow your platform, how to increase your social media network more efficiently, or how to structure your book to better meet your audience’s felt needs.
I’m away on faculty at a writers conference this week and won’t be able to respond to your comments. Use this blog space today to share your golden learning moments with each other. You never know, yours might be the gem someone else in our blog community needs to hear at this moment. And what a great community we have here. God works in and through each of us.
Have a fruitful time of sharing. I can’t wait to read your comments!
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Richard Mabry
I remember the incident vividly. I was sitting in the lounge at Mt. Hermon, having presented the outline of my novel to Jeff Gerke. And he asked, “So what?” I went on to explain what I wanted the hero to do. His answer: “So what?” The more I talked, the more he gave the same response. Finally I figured it out. In a novel, there needs to be a simple, direct, easy to understand expression of why the hero’s goal is important and the consequences of failure. That’s why, when writing subsequent novels, one of the first questions I ask myself is, “So what.”
Leah E. Good
Jeff Gerke is awesome. I had the privilege of eating with him several times at a recent conference. Thanks for sharing!
Michelle Ule
Very simple: I don’t think you started this in the right place.
Sig.
Kathryn Elliott
Grrr!! I should have t-shirts made with this one.
Rachel
Beth Jusino looked at some of my pages and told me I was letting the reader in on too much. Allowing the reader to read between the lines adds tension to the story, she said. I cut 10k from my novel and was amazed. Letting the reader work out what was going on from the action and from what was not being said not only added more tension, it lightened up a few scenes that had felt too heavy.
Jenni Brummett
It’s hard to find the balance between withholding information from the reader until the perfect moment, and consistently moving the story forward.
Beth
Thanks, Rachel! Glad I could help.
Norma Horton
Essentially, eviscerate.
Jennifer Major
I can echo Michelle and Richard’s words. Starting in the right place is critical to drawing the reader in. But not just “drawing” the reader in, grab him/her my the heart and pull them off their feet, right into the story. The ‘so what’ factor needs to be on the first page.
It took me a while to learn that, but once I did, my early readers let me know the difference between my early work and my better work.
Carissa
That is really helpful Jennifer, thank you! Could you give an example of a “before” and “after” of incorporating the so-what factor immediately, in order to “grab the reader’s heart and pull them off their feet”? I’m a novice, and learn better with concrete examples! 🙂 Thank you!
Jeanne T
Two pieces of advice from the same person. 1) Ask “Why” to get to the depth of my characters. My heroine is __________. Why? Because this happened. Why? etc.
The second piece of advice is to tell the story between the quotes. I’ve loved this because it has really helped me eliminate tons of prose and backstory.
Meghan Carver
That bit of advice, tell the story between the quotes, has been wonderful for me as well, Jeanne. Not just to eliminate prose but also to ratchet up the conflict between characters.
Jeanne T
So glad I’m not the only one who’s benefitted from it. 🙂
Gabrielle Meyer
I gave one scene to a critique partner a couple years ago when I had just started writing seriously. She gave me back that first scene and it was bleeding red from her critique. But I learned about POV shifts, RUE, tightening my sentences, action and then reaction, and so much more. I was humbled by that first critique and realized I needed to start studying the craft of writing. She did tell me that if this scene was my first attempt at writing (without reading a single craft book), she was going to go home and throw away her manuscript. 🙂 It was just the thing to say to give me the courage to keep trying.
Jeanne T
Now THAT’S a sweet friend—honesty AND encouragement!
Jackie
My aha moment came courtesy of my friend Kristin, who read my first draft and said, “I feel like X would happen here.” It became the climax of the book and the pivotal moment for all the strong emotions of the story. I’m so grateful to her for speaking up!
Kathryn Elliott
Advice is a gift, sometimes I open it with relish, savoring each word, while other times I search through the wrappings desperate for the return receipt. By far the best professional advice I ever received was two years ago from the first agent I queried, the late Pamela Strickler. Miraculously, the material garnered a full request. Now I know that’s a fluke, but a happy fluke. (Followed by 20 subsequent rejections). I crossed my fingers and waited for her response.
And when the response came….Oh, the horror.
In retrospect, her critique was spot on, however I was too blind with failure tears to see past the stinging assessment. Now here’s the kicker, the very last paragraph, beneath the grocery list of missteps and foibles, was an invitation to revise and resubmit. “Your writing style has promise, and this storyline contains the bones of a marketable series. Add flesh and blood and we can talk again.”
Did I? No, I was a coward and shelved the MS in favor of a fresh start. I slinked off to lick my wounds and missed a potential chance to work with a gem agent. I hear the collective *gasp* from the fellow newbies, it was a mistake and I realize that – in spades, and after reading about Ms. Strickler’s passing recently, I dug out that first MS from dusty e-files. With my current work in the hands of the best betas ever, and a year of hard lessons and writing classes under my belt, I took a stab at Ms. Strickler’s suggested revisions. After burning the prologue, completing comparisons and purging the adjectives, I remembered why I loved the story, the characters and jumped head first into serious polishing for round two of critique and query.
It’s never too late to take good advice! Safe travels, Mary!
Jenni Brummett
You capture the highs and lows of the writing life beautifully. Also the fact that remaining teachable is key. I love how you’ve revived the old MS. Keep bathing it in a healthy dose of hope.
Kathryn Elliott
Thank you, Jenni.
Carissa
Thank you for sharing that Kathryn! I would like to ask you though (as a newbie here), what specific writing classes you took in that year that you feel really made the most difference?
Kathryn Elliott
Hi Carissa: I took the most away from a two-part seminar on developing pacing and multi-dimensional characters. Although I physically attended the class at our local community college, several agents/publishers offer webinars on both topics. Twitter is always a good source to start the search. Hash tags are a writer’s treasure map! Good luck. 🙂
Jeanne T
Wow, Kathryn, what a great story. And thanks for the reminder, that we can always take good advice. Even if it’s ages after receiving it. 🙂
Kiersti
The critique I was thinking of also came from an agent’s (not from Books and Such) rejection, Kathryn–also one with detailed input as to why she wouldn’t represent me. 🙂 While I couldn’t bring myself to open my manuscript again for a month after that rejection, I came to realize that while I didn’t agree with all her points, she had some really good ones–especially that I hadn’t taken the story far enough with the ramifications my hero and heroine would face with a Navajo/Anglo romance in 1911. I cut some from the beginning, added a good 20,000 words to the end (it had been on the shorter end of novel size, which should have told me I hadn’t gone far/deep enough), and ended up with, I think, a much stronger story. I’m very grateful to her now! 🙂
Lindsay Harrel
One of the best things that happened for me was a rejection from an agent. She said my writing was good but that my plot wasn’t unique enough to sell quickly in this market. That got me into gear, thinking, “What can I do to get a unique plot?” That’s when I signed up for My Book Therapy’s Storycrafter’s retreat, because I knew I needed to focus on plotting. Changed my writing completely.
Larry
“We’d like something more mainstream.”
Dunno how many agents have wrote that in reply to my queries: now, getting turned away by agents is usually a bummer, however I realized from being turned away for not being “mainstream” that the book I wanted to write was the book that I had created.
And no value can be put on that. 🙂
donnie nelson
I just got this critique 2 weeks ago. (Warning: It’s not pretty)
The guy said, in about 300 words or more, “Throw your MS in the trash and start over.”
Ouch! That stung.
donnie nelson
Now for my best advice:
1. Don’t fall in love with your words.
It will be that much harder to kill the darlings latter. (Elmore Leonard)
2. Bore no one. (George Luca)
donnie nelson
Sorry: George Lucas . . . but you already knew that.
Kathy Boyd Fellure
Great advice ~ thanks for sharing these quotes.
Christine Dorman / @looneyfilberts
I so sorry, Donnie. That was harsh. Did he give any constructive advice in the 300 words? Anyway, I think I would get feedback from a couple of other people before completely trashing the manuscript. Have you thought about a professional critique? Writers Digest has a great critique service (of course there are many others as well, but I’ve used the WD critique service and so I can tell you from experience that it was very helpful). It would be very expensive to have your whole manuscript critiqued, but WD will critique 50 pages at a time, so perhaps you could get feedback on the first 50 pages (with suggestions of how to improve them). That might give you a way to gauge just how much work would have to be done to get this particular manuscript up to speed. Then you can make an informed decision about whether or not to trash it. Hopefully, you’ll find that the manuscript has merit. The guy who told you to trash it may not have recognized its value. Look at how many times the book THE HELP and HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE were rejected. The agents and editors who passed on those manuscripts undoubtedly regret that decision.
Blessings!
Andrew Budek-Schmeisser
But remember that Richard Bach shopped Jonathan Livingston Seagull for a long time, and got stinging rejections, before it was picked up.
Don’t throw it in the trash. You may just need the right fit.
Jenni Brummett
My critique partner helps me consistently highlight the power of scripture in my stories.
Recently I received a suggestion to work on pacing, so I ordered a slew of craft books on this subject. I’m praying that what I learn transforms my novel and makes it more marketable, because I would be honored to work with the agent who gave the advice.
Andrew Budek-Schmeisser
The best advice I got came from the late Marvin Mudrick, with whom I studied writing for seven years.
Don’t write ‘sensibility stories’, in which the focus is on how the main character reacts emotionally to what’s happening. Show the emotional response through action first, and then – carefully – with dialogue.
Also, never let a character chuckle. Real people don’t do that.
Heather Marsten
To use all five senses in my writing – helps pull the reader into the story. The other tough one was having someone tell me several scenes did not advance my plot – in retrospect the person was right and I had to cut out beloved scenes because they didn’t flow with the theme of my memoir. I love criticism for I learn so much from being told the truth (in love).
Karen Nolan Bell
While attending Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman Settlement School last year, I was near tears because every person who read my first chapters thought I should change it to suit their style. I was ready to give up. I sat with Robert Morgan, author of some tiny (haha) tomes such as Daniel Boone patiently listened to my whine-fest and gave me the best advice I’ve ever had. He told me to forget about what other writers think and to tell the story that’s in my heart from my own voice. Everyone will not like it. But, the right people will think it’s the best thing they’ve ever read. Point–be true to your own voice and style.
Peter DeHaan
After sharing a section from my memoir with my critic group, one seasoned author said my writing was solid, she smiled kindly, and then added “Now, I want to see you bleed.”
I’ll never forget those words, and I apply them often.
Lynn Hare
1.) Get established by getting published in periodicals before writing your first book.
2.) Put building relationships with others ahead of self-promotion.
3.) Slow & steady wins the race.