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Rachel Halpern

2012 Alpha Fundraiser

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There are so many reasons we love Alpha. It’s not just that it makes successful writers out of talented teenagers, although we all learn a lot about stories, plots, character arcs, dedication, even about where to send our work. It isn’t even just the ten days at the workshop, though those are full of learning and new friendships, serious author lectures and quiet time to write and games of Ultimate Frisbee.

Alpha, the experience, continues long past when we leave the University of Pittsburgh campus. The Alpha alumni have a critique group where they edit each other’s work, talk about ideas, support each other, encourage each other to keep writing. Those connections have kept me writing and have kept improving my work in the years since I was last an Alpha student. Even beyond that, some of my closest friends, the ones I talk to the most, the ones who support me when times get rough – they’re people I met at Alpha. I was lucky, going into Alpha – I had fun, nerdy, friends who liked reading and liked learning. I know a lot of people who didn’t. But what I didn’t have was people who fundamentally got me. Even before the workshop started, talking online to the other writers, I remember this giddy feeling of disbelief – these people understand me. They’re fun and smart and they think about stories the same way I do, and even though they’re the coolest people I’ve ever met, they still think I’m worth spending time with. Staff members and authors who wrote brilliant pieces and gave brilliant lectures thought I should take my writing seriously. That was an unbelievable gift as a teenager whose freshman year English teacher had told her parents she “wasn’t really a writer, was she?”

So yes, meeting Tamora Pierce, whom I worshiped, was a dream come true, and yes, playing Ultimate Frisbee was a ton of fun and yes, I learned to write and edit and critique better than I’d ever learned before. But I also learned to take myself, and my writing, seriously, and I made friendships that have lasted me a lifetime.

Alpha tries incredibly hard to keep costs low, with an all-volunteer staff and tremendous alumni support – but there are plenty of teens who deserve the sort of life-changing summer I had, that we had. Every year we need about $3,000 for scholarships for students, and so for the past several years the alumni have been putting together donations drives trying to keep operating costs low and scholarships feasible.

This year, we’re holding an auction as part of our fundraiser, and offering an e-book anthology of stories written, collected, and illustrated by Alpha alumni. We’re auctioning off donations from Tamora Pierce, John Joseph Adams, George R. R. Martin, Ellen Kushner, Patrick Rothfuss, Theodora Goss, Karen Healey, and many other brilliant authors and editors. Those with winning bids, and anyone who donates any amount, at any time during the fundraiser, will get a copy of the anthology and, of course, our undying gratitude.

So take a look at the fabulous prizes, and bid if you like them, and think about donating just because there are teens all over the world (and we’ve had them from as far away as New Zealand) who could use something like Alpha in their lives. And based on the work I’ve seen come out of it, I think the world could use their stories, too.

Description: Part Two

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the second half of my two-part post on description! Part one can be found here.

Getting back into it, let’s start with Rule Three, which I consider the most important rule: I would argue that all description (as with anything else in your story) should inherently be guided by point of view.

Sometimes using POV to guide description is obvious – don’t describe anything your narrator isn’t aware of. Don’t show the reader something they can’t see or talk about the sound of something they’ve never heard.

This sounds easy, but sometimes it sneaks up on you, as, most often in my experience, with physical descriptions of your main character. If you’re writing in a close or limited perspective – showing the thoughts and experiences of a single main character, usually in first or third person – your character should never think “Wow, my eyes are really dark and cold right now as I glare at this jerk.” They are much more likely to describe said jerk, for instance, “Ha-ha, watch him grow pale with fear and cower before my wrath!”*

But beyond that, using point of view isn’t just about not showing what your narrator physically can’t detect. Especially for a close point of view, as in most stories, what you want is to be careful to observe not only what your character can, but what your character would observe – what is your narrator experiencing, what does your narrator notice? I rarely stop in the middle of a conversation with someone and think “Goodness, this friend I’ve known for years – her eyes are really dark brown. How astonishing!” (Well, your narrator could do that, but an attentive reader is likely to assume they’re falling in love.)

Physical descriptions in general are pretty tricky. When I think about people, me personally, I rarely think about what they look like, especially if I’ve known them a long time. I think even less about what I look like, especially if I’m in the middle of something and not standing in front of a mirror.** If you really need to include your main character’s appearance, one alternate strategy is to show how others react to them, rather than describing them directly. This can be blatant, as with Harry Potter being constantly told how his green eyes are just like his mother’s, but it can also be subtle. Instead of saying that your narrator is scary or attractive, you can show everyone reacting with fear and attraction. This cuts back on characters standing around thinking about what they look like when they could be off doing things.

For describing side characters, it’s usually reasonable to give some description, although, as above, it’s a bit weird to describe in depth someone the narrator has known for years. On the other hand, maybe your main character is really shallow, and even if not, it’s pretty typical to provide physical descriptions of love interests or opponents (the difference between grappling for your life with someone half your size vs. twice your size is generally pretty important, as descriptions go). Regardless of what character you’re describing, you want to be sure the details you choose give us significant information – eye color is rarely essential to the story,*** but saying someone has hard eyes, though it tells us very little about their appearance, can tell us a lot about their character, just as having a soft voice is more meaningful than being a soprano (if neither character actually sings).

As with physical description, you can often determine what setting details to show just by thinking through your narrator’s personality. If they notice something, if it matters to the scene to know it’s there, then it should be described. If your character is busy, don’t go on about the exquisite tenderness of new leaves. If, on the other hand, your narrator fancies himself a love poet and is standing in the woods, embracing nature, a brief aside on the graceful sweep of branches cascading from the treetops is completely in character – as long as the scene isn’t meant to have any sense of urgency.

One thing I’ve found useful is to read a bunch of different authors and genres – I’ve found that traditional high fantasy tends to have the really long and elaborate descriptions, urban fantasy and hard SF have more efficient descriptions, paranormal romance will really do up the physical character descriptions… For the really poetic and intricate descriptions that still feel plausible, among other things, I’d recommend N.K. Jemisin’s books (I’d recommend them anyway, they’re wonderful). I read Megan Whalen Turner’s books to see relatively simple prose describing things subtly and elegantly. Reading what works and what doesn’t work will help you find the right voice for your story and help you see what will make your description effective.

There are little rules as well – one of the famous laws of writing is never to use an adjective where a strong noun will do, and never to use an adverb at all. And often this is true – if you’re trying to craft a description in streamlined prose, it’s far more graceful to say someone “sprinted” than that they “ran very quickly,” for instance.

These are good guidelines, but at the core of description, the rules are simple – stay in character, be specific, be vivid, and see what works for you.

So, having read all that, what do you think? How do you write description? What do you think is hard or easy about it? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
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*Please don’t use either of these actual lines in your writing; I will not be held responsible.

**Personal pet peeve: I beg you not to ever have your character sit in front of a mirror and contemplate their appearance as a solution to the “my narrators can’t see themselves from outside” problem, unless there is a really good reason for your character to sit in front of a mirror, like they’re at the hairdresser’s getting a deeply plot-significant and life-changing haircut, or they’re so vain they can hardly tear themselves away and by the end of the story they will have turned into a flower like Narcissus. Even then, use this device sparingly. It’s not that it’s a terrible idea inherently, and it seems like a pretty natural solution to the problem. The problem is mostly that it’s just overused, so it feels like “Oh, one of those staring in the mirror scenes again,” but it’s also a bit implausible, and it never really moves the plot along because instead of doing things, your character is just sitting there.

***Let me repeat that, actually: eye color is pretty much never relevant to the story. People use eyes a lot, their characters’ vivid eye color, hard stare, twinkling gaze – and while it’s really easy and tempting to write, it’s also easy to overuse. Plus, the number of times I have actually read someone’s expression in their eyes, well, let’s just say it doesn’t happen often. So don’t totally cut it out of your writing – there are good reasons it’s used a lot – but be careful to use it because you mean to, and not to overuse it.

Description: Part One

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When I was in middle school and had just gotten into The Lord of the Rings, I was shocked to hear my friends describe the books, books that I considered haunting and hilarious works of art, as dense and boring – “too much description,” they said. “Too many hills.” I was appalled. At the time, determined to love the books and with a knack for skimming, I completely missed what many of my friends had already gotten, which was that Tolkien, while brilliant in many ways, does not know when to stop. He writes about his settings in exhaustive, loving detail, and for those people who read mainly for plot and characters and dialogue and the other things that make a story exciting, this makes for a fairly dull and inaccessible novel.

Although I love Tolkien, I have to acknowledge that too much description slows things down and pulls the reader away from the action. On the other hand, a story with little to no description is also a problem. If the narrator gives us nothing as readers, it leaves us to imagine the characters conversing in an empty room surrounded by blank walls – and believe me, readers very rarely supply their own setting, and a lack of description is typically read as empty space. I’ve read, and written, stories where the world around the characters could have been a warm sunlit island or an astonishingly huge cardboard box without changing the action, and that’s a serious problem.*

So, description, essential yet dangerous.

What I’ve found works best for me, in deciding when to describe and when to exclude, is a set of three cardinal rules. If you have other rules to suggest, I’d love to hear them in the comments!

Rule One: Don’t make descriptions long for their own sake. Every word in a short story has to matter, and “but my prose is really nice here” is usually not a good enough reason, no matter how attached we get (and oh, the scenes I have written that were totally the most beautiful thing I had ever produced, and in which for long stretches the action was left by the elaborately depicted wayside, and which I subsequently had to cut).

Mostly the problem with these long descriptions is that they just slow everything down, since any time you spend describing someone’s looks or the exact texture of a curtain is time during which nothing happens, which decreases suspense and loses the story’s focus.

Instead of long descriptions, choose precise, vivid details. Using sharper, rather than longer, description will show your reader far more than a lengthy treatise on everything in sight can. Do your narrator’s legs stick to the leather couch in the heat? Does her best friend’s house always smell faintly of rosemary?** Does the clock in the background tick just a bit irregularly and therefore infuriatingly, pulling your narrator’s thoughts away from the conversation? It only takes a detail or three to set a scene and make it memorable, engrossing the reader without breaking the narrative flow the way a page of elaborate imagery would.

These details can also provide more than a simple sensory impression. They can create a mood (the difference in tone between “ice blue” and “powder blue” is significant even though the colors are the same). When you describe the room, do you mention the suffocating heat or the cool breeze from the window fan? Shadows can be dark and jagged, overlapping, twisting into shapes like lost souls or demons not quite discernable, edging ever closer, seeping in from the hidden corners of the cramped room. Or they can be cool, friendly, a soft play of shapes on the wall like shadow puppets when we were children, here a rabbit spilling from the night light and there a box turtle lifting a sleepy head behind the sock drawer, familiar from nights of drifting to sleep in the quiet stillness of the bedroom. It’s all in the details and words you choose.

Rule Two: Timing is essential. Describe things early if they’re necessary to the scene – if there’s anything in the setting that the reader needs to know about, you should set it up early. It’s easy to set up a scene and forget to mention there’s a table with a gun on it. Halfway through, when your character reaches for the gun, it will seem to the reader like a large table and a highly relevant gun have appeared out of nowhere instantaneously. So make sure you set everything up ahead of time.

Even for less dramatic details, when you describe them is always important – it doesn’t make much sense to have your characters pause in the middle of an argument or a battle scene and think in loving detail about the feathery softness of the carpet under their feet. Choose your time carefully.

The third (and maybe most important) rule will appear in my second post on description, here! It has book recommendations and even more footnotes, so you know it will be good!

How do you go about writing description? What details do you think are important? Comment here (or on the next post, once it’s up)!
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*Yes, obviously, there are exceptions to both the too-much and the too-little rules of description, as we Tolkien fans and any Hemingway aficionados you might find would gladly argue. Still, as with style or anything else in fiction, before you can do something new and experimental and clever, you must first be able to do it right, and usually that means learning the basics before you experiment. And, as with everything in writing, whatever experimental styles you use should be intentional, there because you want a slow or a spartan story and not because you got caught up in the beauty of your own words and decided the description was more important than the plot, or because you forgot to describe the setting.

**As Gregory Frost, author of Shadowbridge, said at a past Alpha, “Try doing smells that are not urine smells.” In real life, we notice smells a lot (smell is really tightly connected to emotion and memory, in fact), but most books include few smells that aren’t death, decay, or blood. It’s easy to get caught up in only showing visual details (and characters in pain), but that really isn’t how we experience the world, and you’re missing out on opportunities for intense experiences if you leave out the other senses.

Beginnings

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Everyone seems to do beginnings differently. Some people start with a single line intended to somehow encompass the entire story. Some people start mysteriously, with statements you won’t understand until several paragraphs or pages later. You can start near the end, start in the middle of the action (in medias res, like Homer!), start with dialogue, with suspense, with a perfectly normal day that’s about to go haywire.

Here’s a rule I learned from quite a few publishers – and they’re the ones accepting the stories, so unlike most of my advice, this bit is actually really solid, not just from my experience. Don’t start with “I woke up.” Your character doesn’t need to wake up. They do that every day. We know that for the story to take place, they must have awakened at some point. Skip it.

Everything else here is a mix of what I’ve heard, what I’ve seen, and what I’ve tried.

I’ll start with a piece of advice I’ve heard that has really worked for me – the place where you start writing and the place where your story really starts are not always the same place.

This is important for me, because I always have to write my way into anything, and sometimes you just have to start writing at “I woke up” and go from there. You might write through a whole day of action to learn who your character is and what they do on a normal day. Only then does the weirdness start. But often your story starts not with the normal day, but with the crazy day that comes afterward. One strategy I’ve seen and liked is to write and, when the story’s over, to go back and see if you can cut the first page, or at least the first scene. Get to the action faster, with less setup. There have been scenes that I’ve had to write to understand the story that, looking back, my reader doesn’t need to understand the story. It’s surprising how much of the beginning can be thrown away sometimes without losing anything. So just think – where does the really important stuff begin?

The beginning of the story has various purposes. Of course it needs to set the whole story up, either hinting mysteriously or giving necessary information or just starting into the plot. But most of all, especially in short fiction, the true goal of a beginning is the hook. If you can’t convince the reader within a page – preferably within a paragraph, or even a line – that this story is worth reading, it’s hard to get it read, let alone published if that’s your goal (and it might not be! Writing is fun for writing’s sake. But a good story should capture the reader’s attention no matter what).

But what counts as a hook? Well, at Alpha, we sit in a circle, read our first lines aloud, and have people raise their hands when they’re hooked by the story. It was a good way to see what, in fact, catches people’s attention and makes them want to read more. Asking friends (or, better yet, critiquers) whether your beginning grabs their interest is a good way to see if it’s working. Of course, you have to consider your audience. One particularly morbid year, we were all forced to the conclusion that with that group, the best way to grab anyone’s attention was to kill someone within the first paragraph.

Not every audience is going to want a dead body in the first line, and not every story has any dead bodies to use. The exploding spaceship is a famous eye-grabber, but really good writing, a line of particularly clever dialogue, a mystery that needs solving, a hint at something coming – any of these will pull the reader in. If your story doesn’t start with action, you could start instead with something surprising, something strange, or something funny.

Basically, I’ve found that what works for me is a combination of being aware of what makes a good beginning, cutting away the start to get directly into the action, and checking with people to make sure the start draws interest enough. There are other methods – you can try to always start immediately with an action or suspense scene. Witty dialogue is often a good grabber. You can start with a mystery, or with a surprise, or with your main character looking back over the events to come. I’ve seen people use these tactics, and they work. Not having perfected them, I tend to start simply where I think the story starts, and hope that an interesting first line and a plot-related first scene will carry the story.

Those are the general strategies I’ve seen and the ones that work f or me. Beyond that, the one trick I’ve seen to starting a story is a quick teaser from the end of the story. If anyone’s read Twilight, that’s a perfect example – start in the middle of the climax, and then back up. A lot of TV shows do this too – an explosion or a murder or a fall, and then the little subtitle: One Day Earlier. Then the show actually starts. If the real beginning of your story is while your main character is doing something relatively boring, and you need a hook, then you can do that, put the climax at the beginning so you get people’s attention. This is actually a pet peeve of mine; stories that do that kind of drive me crazy. I vote you just make your beginning interesting. But that’s completely personal preference, and lots of people do it, so it must be a decent method. If that’s what works for your story, that’s an easy way to get some action in before the action starts.

Most importantly, the first line, paragraph, and scene – that’s what you should polish the most. It’s the first thing a reader sees, and a mistake or an awkward sentence can sometimes lose the reader as easily as an exploding spaceship can grab one.

What do you think? How do you write beginnings? What holds your interest when you start a story? What tactics did I leave out? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Note: In the comments, there’s a mention of the “Red Line of Death” exercise. This is an alternative to the hook exercise I mentioned earlier, where people raise their hands when they’re caught and want to read more. In the Red Line of Death, someone (at Alpha, we were shown this by a top sci-fi magazine editor, but you could have anyone do it, the way the hook exercise worked) puts a red line on the manuscript at the moment where he or she loses interest in the story. Because it’s focused on losing instead of catching a reader, this sort of exercise makes it easier for a piece with solid writing to do well vs. one with a distinctive action hook.

How to Critique: Part Three – Questions

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I’ve already talked about the process of critiquing, both for general comments and for line edits (You probably want to read How to Critique: Part One and How to Critique: Part Two before you read this post). There are or will be other blog entries by other people on how to write plot or worldbuilding or exposition, so I don’t want to spend a lot of time on what those “should” be like in the story you’re critiquing. And, in any case, every story is different and every approach is different. Instead of a set of rules for what the story should be like, I’d like to focus on the process. Since the process will also vary somewhat each time, I just want to provide a guide to the questions I ask myself when I’m doing general critiques, questions you might find helpful as you’re thinking about the story you need to critique.

This post is a list of those questions, and a few suggestions for what to do with the answers.

Characters:

Do I find the characters believable? Do I care about them, positively or negatively? Do I believe that they would take the actions they take? Are they distinctive, memorable, three-dimensional?

Do the characters change throughout the story? Is the main character a different person at the end of the story, altered by their experiences and the choices they make (this character arc is essential to the story, so the answer should definitely be yes)? Do I believe that change?

Plot:

Is the plot convincing? Do I believe everything that happened would really have happened, given that situation and those people? Is the ending set up by the beginning? Does the pacing work, or does the story feel a) so slow it’s boring, b) so fast it feels rushed, or c) full of holes, so that it’s hard to tell what’s happening when? Could the story stand to be longer or shorter? Do the events of the story matter – do they matter to the characters and do they matter to the reader? Is the end of the story different from the beginning?

Setting:

How about the setting? Is it convincing, interesting, worth reading about? Is it a white-background story — could you lift everything in the story and put it anywhere, anywhen? Do the characters seem suited to the world as if they are really from it? Is it borrowed from traditional stock settings, or has the author made it their own? Has real effort been put in to make the customs, language, landscape, etc. fit together naturally?

The genre element:

Is the magical/technological element essential to the story? Does it work logically, or does it appear that the magic can do whatever the author wants? Is the fantastic element interesting and at least somewhat original? If the fantastic element were something else entirely, would it change the story (the fantastic element should be necessary to the plot; if you could replace zombies with unicorns, or worse if you could replace the magic with a completely normal automobile, then there’s something wrong with the magic/tech system)?

General reactions to the story:

Are there events, places, or people that could be cut from the story and never be missed? Does it need something else to work?

How do I feel after reading this story? Is the conclusion satisfying? Did I enjoy it? Did I care what was going to happen?

You should be thinking about most of these questions (and, of course, many more) as you critique. You’ll find the questions that work for you as you go along. As for answering them, just remember that your opinion counts, and your job is to make this the best possible story. If you have suggestions, offer them. If it felt flat to you, then you should tell the author that.

Whenever possible, as you answer these questions, you should be specific. If it felt flat – why? Were the characters unconvincing? Did the plot end in a way that was totally unsatisfactory? And if so, were the characters unconvincing because their actions were illogical, or because the dialogue was poorly written? Was the plot unsatisfying because it was unlikely, because it was depressing, because it didn’t resolve the problems the story introduced, because nothing happened? Try to be precise. If you can find examples in the text of when the characters behave illogically, bring it up. If you can think of some action that would have made the plot make sense, suggest it. You want to give the author as much to work with as possible.

Meanwhile, though it’s always helpful to be specific, and it’s usually good to give suggestions, that doesn’t mean you have to every time. Even if you don’t know quite why you felt a certain way about the story, it’s probably still worth mentioning. After hearing the problem, the author might be able to fix it even if you aren’t quite sure what the solution should be.

If you haven’t read the last two posts in this series, and you don’t know quite how to use this post, I suggest going to the two previous posts (Part One and Part Two) and taking a look!

And for those of  you looking for critiques of your own work, keep an eye out for Elena’s upcoming post on “How to find a good critique,” which will be up this Friday.

So what do you think? Do these questions help you? What do you ask yourself when you’re critiquing, or looking for a critique? Talk amongst yourselves in the discussion section! I’d love to hear your thoughts.

How to Critique: Part Two – Line Edits

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(This is part two of three in my series of blog posts on how to critique. I recommend reading part one before part two. Part one, on general comments, is the post right before this one. It’s called, conveniently, How to Critique: Part One.)

Line edits are slightly more controversial than general comments. A lot of people don’t bother with them, and some people even refuse to read them. But even when I don’t pass line edits along, I’m virtually guaranteed to do them, and I wholeheartedly recommend them to anyone else working on a critique.

So, what’s so great about a line edit? Well, especially with a final draft, line edits are great for those small problems that lose the reader. Grammatical errors, awkward sentences – these will lose the reader and someone needs to read closely enough to point them out. That’s your job as the critiquer. But that stuff isn’t anywhere near as important in the early drafts, yet I still consider line edits to be essential to my critiquing process.

Here’s why line edits benefit me as the critiquer:

For one thing, it forces me to really experience the story, every line, and think about it. If the story loses me, is it the plot’s fault, or is it really just that phrase? More importantly, though, it lets me see not just that the plot (or the characters, or the setting) doesn’t work, but when and how it doesn’t work.

When I go through a story, I comment frequently to see what’s going wrong with the experience and the story. If I find myself in the middle of a page with no idea what’s going on, I mention it. If I realize the twist ending halfway through, I mention that too. When I get to the end, my line edits will tell me when I figured everything out, and whether being confused was too frustrating. I’ll remember why it was that I decided I just didn’t like the main character. All of that lets me give feedback that is precise and detailed, rather than vague. “The plot didn’t work for me” is an acceptable critique, but “The plot would have worked had I not figured out the twist on page six when Alphonse cryptically shouted ‘No, they’re alive!’” – that’s actually helpful. That’s something specific the author can change. And if I hadn’t marked it in the text, I would have had to do a reread, trying to figure out when it was that I figured out they were alive (or when it was that I decided Alphonse was too stupid to live, or why the whole middle of the story was confusing, or whatever the problem actually was).

Now, you guessing the ending, hating a main character, or being totally confused – that might be the author’s intended effect. They want you to watch the horror unfold slowly, knowing it will go wrong. They want you to hate the main character so you will laugh at his pain. And they plan to clear up all that bewilderment in half a page. That’s entirely possible. On the other hand, they might think they’ve kept you guessing until the end; they might think Alphonse is inherently lovable; and they might imagine they’ve been clear in that passage. Either way, they should know whether it’s working.

Sometimes, when I get to the general comments, I realize I’ve found a major problem with the story halfway through. I can then take entire paragraphs of commentary out of the line edits and move them to the end. Rather than being distracted by trying to remember just what I’d thought, I make a note in the margin (or, on a computer, using track changes or parentheses). Then if it turns out to be really important, I leave only a quick note in the text, and put most of the suggestion into the general comments at the end.

So, that’s what line edits can do for you. They allow you to give precise, helpful feedback instead of generalities, and they serve as reminders to you as you’re writing the general comments.

Here’s my process for what to do in line edits and how.

Grammar. It’s the least important thing to look at in line edits, because the entire section might vanish with a plot revision, but while you’re there you might as well take care of it. If the story is actually moving toward a final draft, then this is definitely something to keep an eye out for.

Awkward sentences, confusing phrasing. This is only a slightly bigger deal than grammar. Again, this is something to save for final drafts or just to note in passing in earlier drafts. The main reason to look at this in before the final draft is if it’s a recurring problem. If the author constantly switches between the past and present tense in the middle of scene, that’s worth mentioning. If the characters “shriek” or, worse, “ejaculate” instead of “say” things? Maybe make a note of it. On the whole, though, this isn’t all that important except in a final draft, or if the author asks for help on this specifically. (Note: I tend to do this anyway, because I find it helpful. I’ve discovered over years of writing fiction and essays that sentences which sound perfectly logical in my head don’t always make it in translation. I’ll read and reread them hearing only what I meant, and then someone will come along and tell me it’s ugly and incomprehensible, and that really helps me. So I comment all through on awkward phrasing. Up to you.)

What’s going on? This is where the confusion stuff comes in. I once read a story where I kept coming up with theories of what was going on throughout – things I thought were strongly plausible from the text but weren’t true. Going back, I realized the things I totally misinterpreted were supposed to be valid hints about the Actual Truth. Whoops. So I marked throughout what I thought those hints meant. My confusion doesn’t make it wrong, but it’s important for the author to know that even though you’re reading closely and really thinking about the story, you have no idea what’s going on. This applies also to getting the “twist” ending really early in the story, or to places where the prose becomes so dense it’s impossible to tell what’s even happening.

Places where the experience isn’t working. Did I think that death scene was funny? Was I bored during all the action scenes? If I don’t think I’m reacting well, I’ll point that out.

Notes toward general comments. If I see a problem with plot or a character or something, I’ll put it in here as well as in the final, general comments, so that the author can look back and see what I meant when I referenced a specific moment. More on this in my post on the general story comments, at Part One, and in my list of questions you can ask as you critique, at Part Three.

It’s important to note with all of these line edit suggestions that they can be positive or negative. The majority of your comments should be constructive criticism, pointing out where things don’t work. But if a specific phrase really dazzles you, or there’s a section of dialogue that’s perfectly natural, or everything suddenly comes clear in the last page – let them know. It’s nice for them, and it helps them see the difference between what works and what doesn’t work in the story.

Now that you’ve done line edits, what’s next? See my post on what a critique should be, back at Part One (that’s the post directly previous to this one), or a list of questions to ask yourself when you critique, at Part Three: Questions (that’s be the post right after this one).

So what do you think? What’s the best critique you’ve ever gotten? Still think line edits are garbage? Talk amongst yourselves in the discussion section! I’d love to hear your thoughts.

How to Critique: Part One

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Welcome to the first post in my three-part series on How to Critique!

Now, obviously I am not magically the Best Critiquer Ever Born in the Universe. This is a mix of the stuff that works for me when I’m critiquing and the stuff that I like critiques to do for me. Other critiques can do more or less, and may have a totally different focus (and feel free to talk in the discussion section about the way you critique!). But here’s my take on the critiquing process.

First of all, I think of stories as an experience on a page. The author’s goal is for the reader to feel and think a certain way throughout the story. Obviously every reader brings something different to the story, but there’s still a baseline goal. You shouldn’t know who the murderer is until page 15, you should cry when this character dies and laugh when this other one does. You should understand how my magic system works within two pages (or twelve pages, or perhaps not until the glorious last line).

The story is also, of course, a story. It should have characters (whether lovable or loathsome, they should matter, and they should have character arcs – that is, the events of the story should change them), it should have plot (something must happen that changes things, there should be action of some kind even if it’s just really meaningful dialogue, and at the end the reader should have the satisfaction of a story worth having reached the end of), it should have theme (what is the reader getting out of it?), and it should have all the things that support that. Some of the big ones are dialogue, setting, description, mood, pacing, exposition (all the information your story needs to convey, like the character’s past and the way the world works), and a significant element of the fantastic (in a genre story, anyway).

That’s what the story is – a story that creates an experience for the reader. Now that the author has created it, your job as the critiquer is twofold. On the one hand, your goal is to make those big story aspects work as well as they can. Do you find the characters, plot, setting, etc. believable? Do you care about what happens? Does the plot work logically? Do the characters have an arc? Is the setting done well? Does the magic (or technology) have an important bearing on the plot? And so on.

You are also responsible for discussing the ways in which the experience works or does not work. You’re reading far more critically and distantly than a mere reader, but you should still be able to enjoy and experience the story. Are you sad when sad things happen? Happy when you should be happy? Do you get caught up in the story and wonder what will happen next? Do you fall into the world? Anytime the answer is no, you should be analyzing why. Sometimes what throws you out of the world of the story can be something as small as a grammatical error or an awkwardly phrased sentence, reminding you that are, in fact, just the reader. Sometimes it is something bigger – an implausible decision, a spectacular coincidence, or a passage that simply fails to capture the humor or tragedy of what’s happening in the story.

Now, I think everyone who critiques agrees that the major part of a critique is the critique itself, a written section where you talk about the big stuff, summarize your thoughts on the story, and talk about what really needs fixing. If a character is unbelievable, if the plot fails, you say it here. You’ll see more on that in a moment.

The other part of the critique is line editing the story – writing in comments throughout the actual manuscript. Some people don’t even do line edits. To me, they’re almost as important as the general comments, whether I’m critiquing or receiving a critique. For my post about how to do good line edits, and why they’re not useless but actually awesome, please see How to Critique Part Two: Line Edits (the next post after this one).

So, back to today’s topic: the general comments at the end of a critique, the part where you fix the essentials of a story in big dramatic ways.

Here’s the thought process I follow in writing the general comments at the end of the critique. My critiques are usually divided into three sections, each explained separately here.

Something nice. I always stick the complimentary stuff at the beginning, and rehash some of it in a summary at the end. In between I mostly just rip the story apart. Wherever you put it, this is an important rule: Always make sure you have something nice to say about the story you’re editing. Most of the time you should like something about the story, even if it’s just a particularly beautiful piece of description. Don’t lie, because that won’t help the author, but find something nice to say. I usually try to put at the minimum two small things and one bigger thing. Big things might be “character seems to be your strong point,” “the pacing worked for me,” or “the ending completely tied up the loose ends.” Smaller things could be something like “The title was really cool,” “your first line kept me hooked,” or “the dialogue on page three made me laugh.” If a story is strong on several major elements, I do typically put them all here, at least listed briefly, to give the author credit and to assure them that those parts, in my opinion, don’t need as much work.

A concluding paragraph to sum it all up. Here I try to do something simple, saying what worked and what didn’t, and what I really think they should work on. Yes, this sounds like the kind of thing they make you do in school. My theory is that teachers make you do it partly because it works. You can write really long explanations of why something should be changed in the middle of the general comments. At the end, just remind them which pieces need to be changed and what you liked about the story, without justification. This gives them an easy list of action items of what you thought was most important that they fix.

Then there’s all the critical stuff in the middle. This can take a lot of forms. For me, this is largely composed of the stuff that hits me at the end of the story. I can go through line-editing a story and finding almost nothing wrong, get to the end, and suddenly see why the plot doesn’t hang together and actually the villain wasn’t scary at all and I have no idea where that story took place. This is where you put the big stuff – plot, character, theme, setting, exposition, whether the story works and why it doesn’t.

I usually sit and reexperience the story for a moment, then go back and look for line edits to remind me what reading the story was like.

I’d like to note here that as you look back over the story, even if you don’t know why you felt a certain way at the end, it’s probably still worth mentioning. The author might know what to do to fix it even if you aren’t quite sure.

If you do have a fix you can suggest, that’s even better. For small things, you don’t need to suggest a fix for every detail – the author has spent a lot more time with the story than you have, and probably knows how to change small things. But for big things, it’s the suggested fixes that can take the critique from good to brilliant.

Most of the best critiques I’ve ever received were the ones that didn’t just tell me “I don’t believe in the characters’ actions,” or even, “I would like this character better if…” but the ones that told me something even I didn’t know about the story. I was once told, “I think your character is keeping this a secret because he’s… is he afraid of himself?” And the whole story came together. Even I couldn’t figure out why my character was being so pigheaded, and it was the core of the story. Knowing he didn’t trust himself also changed his motivations throughout the story, and led me to some other realizations that changed the plot substantially.

You won’t be able to do this with every critique. Some stories, you’ll only see the surface stuff. Some stories, you’ll see there’s a problem but you won’t know how to fix it. That’s all right. Probably the author can do it, pointed to the problem, and showing them what doesn’t work is what you’re there to do. But if you have insight into the story, share it. The worst the author can do is ignore you, and at best it might fix everything. To me, that’s a really great critique.

This is the hardest thing to explain how to do, of course. Because it doesn’t always happen that you can really see something and think This! This would fix everything! All I can really suggest is that you look for the core of the story. What is really good about this story that has to be kept? Is there a small change – or even a huge fundamental change – that would really bring that out? I once saw a story about the relationship between two characters where the far more compelling story was in the main character’s relationship with someone else entirely. What is the author missing?

These things might sometimes be really hard. Sometimes you reach the end and you’re just not sure what was wrong with that story, or you can’t find anything to say. To help you with that, I don’t want to tell you what you “should” see in the story. Every case is different. Instead, I’d like to offer up a list of questions to ask yourself as you think back over the story. You can find the questions in my blog entry on questions, at How to Critique: Part Three – Questions. And don’t forget, for my blog post on line edits, go here to How to Critique: Part Two – Line Edits.

So what do you think? What’s the best critique you’ve ever gotten? What process helps you just “get” what should be fixed in a story? Talk amongst yourselves in the discussion section! I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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I’m Rachel Halpern. I was a student at Alpha in 2007 and 2008, and staff in 2009. I write fantasy and like to help other people with their stories at least as much as I like writing my own. I also like dark chocolate, socks, and the smell of bookstores. Besides a three-part series on how-to-critique, I’ll be writing on fairly random topics from story-beginnings to humor.