Revision Help

[mrissa]

I'm not done with Sampo yet, and when I've finished the draft of it, I still have my own first pass of edits to do on Thermionic Night before I ask anybody else to make any sense of the poor mangled thing. But I've been meaning to say: it would be useful to have a filter for people on my friends list who might occasionally be willing to crit my stuff.

Electing to be on this list will not mean that you're willing to critique everything I ask for crits on. It'll just mean that you're sometimes willing to be asked. It is also not a test of your deep and abiding love for me or for my fiction. Some of my very best friends prefer not to crit my stuff, and I think we're both happiest with them not forcing themselves. I will not assume that you love someone better than me if you give them crits and not me, either; some of you have full dance cards in this regard due to preexisting groups, prior ties, etc., and that's not at all a problem. (For me. If you're sick of your crit group, I really can't help with that.) Is that enough disclaimers? I hope so.

Oh, one more: I'm not going to do everything you say. Anybody who critiques a piece should know that already, but I want to make it clear so's you're not mopey and disappointed. Unless you have a publishing house behind you and a check in your hand, in which case...I still won't do something deeply stupid if you ask me to, but value-neutral changes are a different thing entirely.

If you're already on my e-mail list, I'll still send out e-mail asking if you want to read the work in question. But a filter might be convenient for me, so if it would work for you and you're interested, now's the time to speak up. It looked like it worked all right for yhlee, so I thought maybe.

This only works for people I've friended, but if you don't have a livejournal or if I haven't friended you and you'd like to crit for me, let me know, and I can e-mail you instead.

Comments

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

I'm more than willing to read. Be glad to help.

My style of critique is not to suggest changes, however, so much as to simply ask questions. I figure that if the author can answer my question, s/he can then say "Oh, well, better explain that in the book." :-)

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

While there's immense variation in how authors seem to work with critiques -- there seems to be a fairly strong tendency for them to find pointing out *problems* (or questions you have) to be more useful than suggesting actual solutions, except in the case of people being consulted for particular expert knowledge.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. That's kind of what I was aiming at. :-)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, very true. While I've occasionally seen someone in a crit group benefit from a direct "I think you should do X," or "I'd love to see Y," mostly "I didn't get this/I really liked this bit" is what's useful.

Hmm. Actually, that was mostly from Ken. One of my California crit group members had a talent for suggesting something interesting to do with a story even if it wasn't the right thing. He inspired alternate solutions when he couldn't provide them directly. It was great, but it's neither necessary nor expected in a crit group. It was amazing he wasn't annoying more often, but he wasn't.