Posted: May 19, 08 7:35pm
Colleagues,
Thought this a good moment to revisit one of the best guides to critiquing I've yet to come across. With bushels of gratitude to Adair Lara! (Suggest you cut and paste this into a file you can save and savor as needed.)
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Feedback: How to Give It
By Adair Lara
It's important to hear thoughtful, constructive, honest criticism-it's the only way I can trust my partner, and it's the only way I can grow as a writer. --Lynn Befera
Having a writing partner means you are working on a special skill: that of giving illuminating, constructive, relevant and encouraging feedback. A successful critique makes the writer want to rush to the computer and begin working on the piece again. He is encouraged that the reader found lines to admire, and excited to get clear and constructive suggestions for improvement. The critique adds to his knowledge of himself as a writer and to what he knows about his voice.
You may worry that you aren't good at critiquing-that you know when something doesn't sound right, but not how to explain it or fix it. As one of my students commented, "'Wow, how fabulous!' didn't seem to be what my partner had raced home to open her email to hear."
But as a reader, you already know a lot about writing, whether you realize it or not. To borrow Nabokov's phrase, you can "rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs." You already know a great simile when you read one, as when my student Georgia wrote that an old lady in the nursing home called out hello to her as she hurried by, "like a survivor hanging onto wreckage hailing a passing ship."
1. The most useful way to begin, often, is also the simplest: just read it and tell her or him not what you think, but what you read: "This is a scene between a mother and a daughter, in which the mother seems to be trying to." For example, a writer will be astonished that what the writer meant a tender piece about her mother's mobile home park comes off as sneering (as I did).
2. Don't read looking for what needs fixing. Writers learn more when you point out something they are doing right than when something doesn't work: there's a lot doesn't yet work in any piece of raw writing. Read for pleasure, stopping only when you have to. At the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, they ask workshoppers to consider each piece as if it has already been accepted for publication-an approach that respects the writer's accomplishment while making suggestions to make it even better.
3. Respond to the writing, not to the story being told. Try not to tell stories of a similar thing that happened to you when your daughter came home from college or a neighbor dented your car. It's a natural response, but takes up too much time. Student Evi Strauss says, "If we're going to be friends, I care whether we agree and am curious about your viewpoint about the content of my work. But I'd rather keep that part separate from the critiques."
A writing partnership is not a support group. A woman named Linda Robinson took my class knowing she had less than a year to live after her cancer came back. She read aloud her piece about going to the funeral home to choose her coffin. "As Joe showed me options from the Lenin-lying-in-state model on down to the shoebox-in-the-backyard version, I had a sudden pleasing vision of being buried in my jewelry box. I asked Joe if you could provide your own container for cremated remains. 'Yes,' he said, 'but you'd be surprised how many people neglect to bring a lid.' I told him I guessed Saran Wrap would be tacky.'"
The class roared so hard the cat ran off, and one woman had a fit of choking. "You laughed," Linda exclaimed gratefully. "I'm so glad you laughed." Linda's classmates suggested she drop the first paragraph about driving into the funeral home parking lot. They admired the part where she peered at the shiny rich wood of a coffin and fogged it with her breath, and needed the part about the incense made clearer. No one had the poor taste to express sympathy. The trip to the funeral home was her material, not news about her life. A writing club is like a marriage. You end up hearing everything there is to hear about somebody else's life, from the way she felt the day her mother died to the summer she spent with the Peace Corps to how trapped she feels in her job. But you don't commiserate, or give advice, or scold, or launch into your own similar stories. You talk about the writing.
It helps to refer to the protagonist of the piece as the narrator, not as "you." Once it's on the page, it's not your writing partner, but a character. You say, "Why does she think that about her mother?" not "Why do you think that about your mother?"
4. Check in with your partner to find out what sort of response she wants. She may not want a critique at all. She might just want to pile up pages, with you keeping an eye on her to see that she forks over her 500 words. She may instinctively know that critical response-even effusive praise-is wrong for her when she's in the zone and cranking out pages.
5. Keep checking in with your partner to see how she's receiving your comments. Ask her to let you know what she wants to know. My friend Janis Newman just published Mary, a fictionalized memoir of Mary Todd Lincoln. I was her partner starting out. She had to fire me when she sent me a scene and I returned it with a comment that began, "I'm afraid this needs a lot of work." Full of myself, full of how I would write the book, I allowed myself to dwell on what wasn't working, not on what was. Janis said that when she read that first sentence she didn't dare read on. She was smart: she protected the tender early draft of her book by finding gentler readers.
6. Be mindful of the gulf between your response and what your partner, who is back at her house checking her email every five minutes, is hoping to hear. Avoid an authoritative tone. "This might work better if?" or "It might read more effectively if?" are good gentle openers. On the other hand, blanket praise "This is so great!" is not as useful as knowing exactly what is so great about it. Writers need to know what they're doing right: Seething, I pull even with the driver's side of the Jeep and latch onto the rear-view mirror. Behind the tinted glass a fearful blonde hastily locks her doors. GREAT SENTENCE
7. Don't comment on style, word choice, punctuation and other sentence-level matters in early drafts. You're to be congratulated for knowing a dangling modifier when you see one, but let your eye skip over it--your partner is trying on outfits-- seeing if the red blazer will work all right with the long black skirt and the low heels-- not going out the door to the interview. Picky little nits can overwhelm and discourage her and make her stare at the piece she wrote with such enthusiasm as if it's a bathroom tile floor that needs scrubbing with a toothbrush.
Polishing comes much later, when your partner knows which sentences she'll keep, and she IS (to keep the metaphor going) about to step out the door for the interview. Then you definitely want to let her know about the spinach in her teeth. Feel free to wear that red pencil down to a nub as you point out anything and everything that catches your eye: an unidentified "we," tense shifts, a need for new paragraph for a change of speaker, confusing chronology, quotation marks go outside the period (in the US), missing transitions, dialogue that's taking place nowhere in particular, when the language appears stilted or vague, and so on. Tell her that it should be her barely detectable wig, not decipherable wig.
8. How's the pace? Where do you want the writer to pause, tell more? Where do you want him or her to speed up? Tell her where your mind wandered, where you got bored.
8. When does the conflict start? At what point do you become really interested? (It's usually the same paragraph.)
10. What are you told that the author could try to find a way to show instead?
11. Ask for examples: If she writes, "I've been to a lot of lesbian potlucks in the last 30 years, and the menus are always pretty grim," demand to see some of those menus. If her dad is ranting about the government at the table in a childhood memory, ask for a snippet of his conversation.
12. Ask why a lot….Why would Paula believe her mother? Why was the narrator sent to her aunt? What was she hoping would happen?
13. How does the problem get resolved? What's the epiphany/resolution?
13. Recognize when the piece works. Mark Childress, author of Crazy in Alabama, led a workshop in which the participants raked a story over the coals. He listened to it all and then said, "All this story lacks is a stamp." He told the writer to send it to "The New Yorker," where it was published.
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