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gementI survived the hot seat at the No Safewords Writers Group on Monday night! Two hours of just talking about 18 pages of my work (by which I mean manuscript formatted pages, so more like 20 pages of a paperback than 20 pages of academic writing). I have a blind spot where I take the last feedback I heard as gospel, so I'm writing this down here so the next time someone gives me TOTALLY OPPOSITE advice I can triangulate.
Any of you who are reading my work and would like to jump over to this story to read, comment, kibitz, etc. before having your opinions colored by the group's feedback... Look for "Bait and Hook" under the heading Playing House. It doesn't include any spoilers or require any background past Mark. Don't read it at work. Trust me.
How it went: I'll start by reminding myself that the first piece of feedback everyone gave me was, "HAWWWWT! I'm not even of this gender/orientation/kink slant, but HAWT!" So that was very encouraging.
The only bit that made me cry or even made me think about crying was when someone asked me if I was thinking of marketing it. I cautiously replied that I might be but I really wasn't ready to deal with... and she ran over me to start telling me something about marketing. I went into a PANIC that she was going to say something soul-crushing about how to cram me into an ill-fitting box, interrupted her three times to tell her that I really couldn't deal with thinking about marketing right now, thank you, but not right now, too painful, and she KEPT TALKING.
It turns out she kept talking because she was saying something 100% encouraging about the fact that a lot of ground has been broken in the romance market, so I won't have to cram myself into any box but my own. That is nice to know, but I was gritting my teeth and crying waiting for her to get to the end of what she had to say, probably giving her the sullen teenager glare. I was completely braced, at the first negative word, to use my safeword. Not fucking kidding about the fact that I cannot deal with this right now. She didn't get that.
The rest was fine.
I was depressed to find that most of the readers were very confused about who was speaking or acting in any given sentence, which tells me I still haven't gotten the conventions right. I thought I'd gotten it right this time. I followed pronoun-antecedent rules, I included cues at least every four paragraphs of dialogue to keep the speakers clear, and I thought the characters had relatively distinct voices. But the readers were unanimously confused, so more signposts it is.
Which means more books on writing, I guess, because I sure can't figure out how to make it clearer without making it clunky as all get-out.
I wonder how much of it is that they were thrown into the middle, though. The people who have read through 75,000 words already have not had trouble following that dialogue, and I hope that is because the characters' voices and predictable actions made it work. The alternative interpretation is that they've just gotten used to my idiosyncrasies by that point, which sends me back to even more of the books on writing.
I found it even more problematic that people were either confused or blindsided by vampire bits. This one's easier to put down to the fact that they started in the middle, but... Yeah. It just made me wonder if I'm being too subtle. There was one particular bit where I was trying NOT to say something the crude way, and the people who have read it on the wiki got it just fine, but several readers at the group *completely* misinterpreted it to the detriment of the story.
Someone said she was startled when a character got bitten, because there had been no mention of the fact that Aldo was a vampire (except in my "welcome to my world" introduction) until that point and she'd kind of forgotten. I'm not sure how to even respond to that, and it makes me sad, because it's not my job to argue with readers, it's my job to make things clear to readers or define them as outside my target audience. But... I can think of at least three ways vampireness was a Thing in the earlier pages of the story, and this is not a world where they go around saying, "Hi, did you remember that I'm a vampire?"
So that's all confusing. It's easy to dismiss each of these things as weird outlier cases, but on each of these things there was at least one other person nodding along. There's no point in getting feedback if I don't take it seriously, but I can't write for everyone. I don't know where to draw the line between "That's too subtle" and "I'm writing for people who like it subtle." Discuss.
They want more period feel to my dialogue and narrative voice, a point on which I guardedly agree. I am still questing for a good source of Georgian slang and sexual euphemism. I've worked very hard at removing anachronisms, and several things that they challenged as anachronisms just weren't, which makes me question their judgment on the subject, but if they're standard readers would it be easier to cut out the things they think are wrong just to avoid the hassle? Again, discuss.
They want more period feel, period. I think if I give it to them in other ways, they won't hanker after it in the dialogue as much. Also, again, they were thrown into the middle. While I told them (after the first complaint on the subject), "Yeah, language is tricky since they're actually speaking French," I think that's the sort of thing that's hard to process as a gut feeling. And if they don't, others won't. Right? Meeeep. Scared that I've been Doing It All Wrong.
They pointed out bits where my verbs could be interpreted other than I intended, leading to physical impossibilities in their mental images. That was very helpful. I'd have liked it better if it had been presented as "Was this what you meant" rather than "Try thinking about it like a movie and acting it out to make sure all the actions work together logically..." Yes. Thank you. Done that part. Just told you I do that part. Please do not assume repeatedly that I skipped that step and tell me afresh that I should go do that as if I had not told you. But feedback is feedback, and my verbs need clarifying, and knowing how to fix that is good.
They want more (you guessed it) physical and visual description. Yep, this is a big horking problem, which I have already identified. I have got to figure this out. They did give some useful advice on specific spots, suggested words that might slip in here and there (hur hur hur).
Some of this is that they were critiquing it as either a short story without other context or as a first chapter. They pointed out that this would make a damn hot first chapter. That brings me to the second bit, which I will bring back out of this text-cut.
In other news, my opening story SUCKS as a representation of the whole. I am chained to certain aspects of it in the way they define character meetings and provide a couple of very specific emotional ingredients.
But it's a saga of romance and hot M/M action, and the first section has... um... no romance and no action unless you count platonic respectful bondage for plot reasons. Which, y'know, I find hot (hence having written it), but I wouldn't expect the rest of it from the first, or vice versa.
Since the relationship necessarily develops, I can't really start with romance, though the first splash scene is currently a heated conversation between the appropriate people, so that might count. But then it slooooooows down. I just want to cut the damned thing out, but it anchors the rest.
I had the brilliant idea of making the second scene something implicitly if not explicitly sexy, and then I'm still left with the frickin' frackin' interminable camping trip of doooom staring me in the face and standing between me and the rest of the plot.
It's the first thing I wrote. It's clumsy. It requires more plot exposition and a larger cast list than the next 200 pages put together, and then it is discarded as soon as it is over. It has POV problems: In later sections I crawl around in people's heads, while the first story is in distant omniscient because close third-person would be too personal. I've tried rewriting in different perspectives, and it dies on the vine.
My instinct is to somehow throw it away and pretend I haven't written it, and start from scratch on that entire bit, see what comes out. I don't know how to do that. It's canon in my head and I don't know how to scratch it and start fresh, and there are POV problems to deal with, and...
It's a millstone, I tell you, a millstone. Any suggestions on how to deal with this?
Any of you who are reading my work and would like to jump over to this story to read, comment, kibitz, etc. before having your opinions colored by the group's feedback... Look for "Bait and Hook" under the heading Playing House. It doesn't include any spoilers or require any background past Mark. Don't read it at work. Trust me.
How it went: I'll start by reminding myself that the first piece of feedback everyone gave me was, "HAWWWWT! I'm not even of this gender/orientation/kink slant, but HAWT!" So that was very encouraging.
The only bit that made me cry or even made me think about crying was when someone asked me if I was thinking of marketing it. I cautiously replied that I might be but I really wasn't ready to deal with... and she ran over me to start telling me something about marketing. I went into a PANIC that she was going to say something soul-crushing about how to cram me into an ill-fitting box, interrupted her three times to tell her that I really couldn't deal with thinking about marketing right now, thank you, but not right now, too painful, and she KEPT TALKING.
It turns out she kept talking because she was saying something 100% encouraging about the fact that a lot of ground has been broken in the romance market, so I won't have to cram myself into any box but my own. That is nice to know, but I was gritting my teeth and crying waiting for her to get to the end of what she had to say, probably giving her the sullen teenager glare. I was completely braced, at the first negative word, to use my safeword. Not fucking kidding about the fact that I cannot deal with this right now. She didn't get that.
The rest was fine.
I was depressed to find that most of the readers were very confused about who was speaking or acting in any given sentence, which tells me I still haven't gotten the conventions right. I thought I'd gotten it right this time. I followed pronoun-antecedent rules, I included cues at least every four paragraphs of dialogue to keep the speakers clear, and I thought the characters had relatively distinct voices. But the readers were unanimously confused, so more signposts it is.
Which means more books on writing, I guess, because I sure can't figure out how to make it clearer without making it clunky as all get-out.
I wonder how much of it is that they were thrown into the middle, though. The people who have read through 75,000 words already have not had trouble following that dialogue, and I hope that is because the characters' voices and predictable actions made it work. The alternative interpretation is that they've just gotten used to my idiosyncrasies by that point, which sends me back to even more of the books on writing.
I found it even more problematic that people were either confused or blindsided by vampire bits. This one's easier to put down to the fact that they started in the middle, but... Yeah. It just made me wonder if I'm being too subtle. There was one particular bit where I was trying NOT to say something the crude way, and the people who have read it on the wiki got it just fine, but several readers at the group *completely* misinterpreted it to the detriment of the story.
Someone said she was startled when a character got bitten, because there had been no mention of the fact that Aldo was a vampire (except in my "welcome to my world" introduction) until that point and she'd kind of forgotten. I'm not sure how to even respond to that, and it makes me sad, because it's not my job to argue with readers, it's my job to make things clear to readers or define them as outside my target audience. But... I can think of at least three ways vampireness was a Thing in the earlier pages of the story, and this is not a world where they go around saying, "Hi, did you remember that I'm a vampire?"
So that's all confusing. It's easy to dismiss each of these things as weird outlier cases, but on each of these things there was at least one other person nodding along. There's no point in getting feedback if I don't take it seriously, but I can't write for everyone. I don't know where to draw the line between "That's too subtle" and "I'm writing for people who like it subtle." Discuss.
They want more period feel to my dialogue and narrative voice, a point on which I guardedly agree. I am still questing for a good source of Georgian slang and sexual euphemism. I've worked very hard at removing anachronisms, and several things that they challenged as anachronisms just weren't, which makes me question their judgment on the subject, but if they're standard readers would it be easier to cut out the things they think are wrong just to avoid the hassle? Again, discuss.
They want more period feel, period. I think if I give it to them in other ways, they won't hanker after it in the dialogue as much. Also, again, they were thrown into the middle. While I told them (after the first complaint on the subject), "Yeah, language is tricky since they're actually speaking French," I think that's the sort of thing that's hard to process as a gut feeling. And if they don't, others won't. Right? Meeeep. Scared that I've been Doing It All Wrong.
They pointed out bits where my verbs could be interpreted other than I intended, leading to physical impossibilities in their mental images. That was very helpful. I'd have liked it better if it had been presented as "Was this what you meant" rather than "Try thinking about it like a movie and acting it out to make sure all the actions work together logically..." Yes. Thank you. Done that part. Just told you I do that part. Please do not assume repeatedly that I skipped that step and tell me afresh that I should go do that as if I had not told you. But feedback is feedback, and my verbs need clarifying, and knowing how to fix that is good.
They want more (you guessed it) physical and visual description. Yep, this is a big horking problem, which I have already identified. I have got to figure this out. They did give some useful advice on specific spots, suggested words that might slip in here and there (hur hur hur).
Some of this is that they were critiquing it as either a short story without other context or as a first chapter. They pointed out that this would make a damn hot first chapter. That brings me to the second bit, which I will bring back out of this text-cut.
In other news, my opening story SUCKS as a representation of the whole. I am chained to certain aspects of it in the way they define character meetings and provide a couple of very specific emotional ingredients.
But it's a saga of romance and hot M/M action, and the first section has... um... no romance and no action unless you count platonic respectful bondage for plot reasons. Which, y'know, I find hot (hence having written it), but I wouldn't expect the rest of it from the first, or vice versa.
Since the relationship necessarily develops, I can't really start with romance, though the first splash scene is currently a heated conversation between the appropriate people, so that might count. But then it slooooooows down. I just want to cut the damned thing out, but it anchors the rest.
I had the brilliant idea of making the second scene something implicitly if not explicitly sexy, and then I'm still left with the frickin' frackin' interminable camping trip of doooom staring me in the face and standing between me and the rest of the plot.
It's the first thing I wrote. It's clumsy. It requires more plot exposition and a larger cast list than the next 200 pages put together, and then it is discarded as soon as it is over. It has POV problems: In later sections I crawl around in people's heads, while the first story is in distant omniscient because close third-person would be too personal. I've tried rewriting in different perspectives, and it dies on the vine.
My instinct is to somehow throw it away and pretend I haven't written it, and start from scratch on that entire bit, see what comes out. I don't know how to do that. It's canon in my head and I don't know how to scratch it and start fresh, and there are POV problems to deal with, and...
It's a millstone, I tell you, a millstone. Any suggestions on how to deal with this?
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Date: 2008-05-29 05:57 pm (UTC)The God-damned Quest been sitting quiet for several months. I hope I hope I hope that one of these days it will spring fully formed from my head like Athena, but I think this may be one of these "write even when you feel horribly uninspired" bits.
I've never had to do that part before. I suspect it will use different parts of my brain.