How to be a Productive and Valued Member of a Writers' Group

How to be a Productive and Valued Member of a Writers' Group

I may not be a bestselling author, but I do know what it takes to be a great member of a writing group. It takes a combination of practice, empathy, and resilience. In fact, it takes much of what it does to be a great writer. Here are some tips. 

1. Read. 
2. So what if you don't like post-modern horror.Read outside your comfort zone. Challenge yourself to learn from and enjoy reading books and stories that you normally would avoid. There are lists of great books of every possible type all over the place. Choose a few. Read them. Just fucking read already. 
3. Did I say anything about reading? Read everything from the back of the cereal box to Tolstoy.
4. But the new James Bond is opening tonight...Show up as often as you can. If you only show up when your own work is being critiqued, you will quickly fall out of favor with the group. 
5. Was that middle, end, beginning? Learn the rules of storytelling. You can do this by reading. Yes reading. Did I mention reading?
6. Orange you glad I didn't say banana? Does the hero always have to reluctant? Do we always have to like the point of view? Once you learn the rules, break them. At least once. (Oh wait, that was a writing tip...Oh well.)

9 Tips for Critiquing Others

1. Why do you keep harping on reading? Have you been reading? Because if you haven’t, you have no business critiquing.
2. Share the love. Be generous. Your critique is important, but your generosity and encouragement as a fellow writer and reader are even more so. Help the other members of your group become better writers by praising what they do well and pointing out what could be better. 
3. Establish trust. This might mean restraining your wildly inventive and brilliant ideas for a session or two while you get to know the group and how they communicate. But there will be time for you to shine as you become a valued member of the group.
4. Nice is as nice does. Nice doesn’t make for good critique. Once you have established trust in the group, you can become more critical. 
5. Lock up your inner snark. Zingers aren’t critique.
6. It's not your story. When you critique, remember the writer may not be writing for you. She may be addressing someone else. It’s your job to make her more successful in her storytelling. It isn’t your job to change the writing into something you would prefer.
7. Know your limitations. If you’ve been reading, then you know what you like and what you don’t like. If a book has been read and loved by many and you can’t stand it, then  that is something worth noting. Why don’t you like it? A little self awareness will help you become better at critiquing work you don’t like.
8. They heard you the first time. When you find yourself (and you will) in the position of trying to convince the other critical readers of your take on the piece under review, stop before it becomes an endless loop. Say your piece, trust that the writer has heard it, and move on. Trust me, that's easier to write than to do. (For me, at least.)
9. Lose the red pen. Critique groups are not editorial groups. There are times when you just cannot avoid picking up the red pen and rearranging words, fixing punctuation, and rewriting sentences. This should never be done for more than a few paragraphs. You are not an editor. You are there to engage with the writing in a meaningful and careful manner that goes beyond fixing poor grammar or a misshapen sentence. This can be extremely difficult. I find the group helps me formalize my critique. So do time and practice.

8 Tips for Getting Critique

1. Mirror mirror on the wall... If what you want from a critique group is an affirmation of your talent, then get an agent and be done with it. Don’t burden the group with your easily bruised ego.
2. How do you keep your armor so shiny? Try to drop your defensive posture. When you have a chance to respond to the critique, use that time to ask questions and get more out of the group. (Hat tip to Eric for pointing this out in his comment.)
3. Know when you need critique and when you need editing. If you don’t want to change your work, then don’t submit it. Give it to an editor.
4. Set expectations for the group. Tell them what you want to learn. Give them guidelines. Every submission you make to the group should be accompanied by 3 questions you want your critical readers to think about. 
5. Don’t wait for something to be perfect. You joined the group for their help. Let them help. Don’t try to impress them with your expertise. 
6. I can't stand up for falling down. Sometimes the best way to succeed is to fail. It’s often easier to make a horrid piece of storytelling great than to improve a mediocre one. 
7. Stand up for yourself. Avoid the critiqued-to-death story. You need to have enough confidence in your story to take the critique that improves your work and leave the other stuff behind. 
8. Remember a project is never finished. It’s abandoned. There is only so close to perfect you can get.

(UPDATE: Thanks to Jackie for advice on the lead ins... and for the best ones.)

Cringeworthy (part 3 of 3)

What is it about writing so powerful that it evokes a physical reaction from the reader?  Beyond cringing, the best and most memorable writing made me exhibit other physical effects that I began classifying in my previous entry and will conclude here:

Plaatsvervangende schaamte

The above mouthful is actually wonderful Dutch term that means literally "place-replacing shame." It's an intense feeling of embarrassment for someone else, usually someone who has no idea how shameful or embarrassing they're behaving. It normally occurrs during 16 and Pregnant, Jersey Shore or any talent show variation of Britain's Got Talent or Voice of Holland, symptoms include: shifting in one's seat, groaning, covering one's eyes, or covering the ears then squeezing the eyes shut and shouting "la-la-la-la-la!" at full volume until the sensation subsides.

The talent shows require lots of work to bring to our screens - including casting calls and pre-auditions before they even get to the screen. And the thing is, what takes a cast of shameless individuals and a television production crew months to achieve, Jonathan Franzen is able to accomplish with a few pages of prose.

In many ways, Franzen is the most subtle entry on my Cringeworthy list: no psychopaths, no drug abuse (well, maybe a little), and no alternate universes - just a well-developed character, who has rock bottom. The most cringeworthy example is found in The Corrections, where the character not only hits rock bottom, but he falls through the floor to continue his ignominious plunge. That character Chip Lambert, the middle child of a fractured Midwestern family. The family is dealing no tonly their own individual troubles, but the rapidly declining health of the family patriarch/bully that brings them altogether for one last Christmas.

While each character in The Corrections has his or her own unique set of troubles, it's Chip's that's the most capricious and outrageous of the bunch. We meet him in New York City, tenuously hanging onto his identity as a "alternative" writer type. It's an identity that firmly rejects his Midwestern past and consequently - his parents. This is not his first attempt at such self actualization. He was already a middling professor of literature at a liberal private college - until he realized he wouldn't get tenure, and decided the best way to deal with it was to take some MDMA and have sex with (and eventually obsess over) one of his students.

Chip escapes to New York City to remake himself, but when we first meet him, this latest iteration of a life is also unravelling: he's flailing over a movie script (which you can sense is even more middling than his not-so-mad skillz as a college docent), his girlfriend is dumping his ass, and the aforementioned ass is flat broke. As if that's not bad enough, his annoying parents are visiting him. He's got to feed and entertain them and never ever let them know that he's not successful. So he goes to Whole Foods filling a basket full of groceries he can't afford. He ends up stuffing a prime piece of salmon down his pants. It's ice cold and he's got to get the fuck out of there, but now he's stuck chatting to the husband of of the woman who can potentially make-or-break his film script. The guy still thinks Chip is cool, so Chip is forced to humor him while the fish starts melting down his crotch...

It was at this point I threw the book down, squeezed my eyes shut and started shouting "la-la-la-la-la!" I can deal with rock bottom, but I can't deal with people who don't realize they're at rock bottom and continue digging - a key theme in the book. Chip Lambert expends so much energy keeping up his various facades, that he has to wait until he's broke, jobless, and jacket-less on a country road in Latvia before he begins reflecting and redeeming himself. It's no surprise that this literary novel has garnered so much recognition. Franzen doesn't need fantastical devices or outlandish settings to make me twist and turn in my seat: "real life" and the real world are clearly outrageous enough.

- Chris

The Speech Squeeze

My most recent peace on Iran commissioned by Article 19:

Learning the language of self-censorship


Poker. Rumi. The US Postal Service motto: Neither snow nor rain nor heat…Serendipity. All have their roots in ancient Persia. No matter how much you think you know about Iran, there’s always more. It’s no surprise, then, that you know so little before boarding a plane to take you to Tehran.

Maybe you’re nervous. Pulling the unfamiliar scarf close around your head. Tucking in loose strands as the plane rattles over the Alborz mountains for its landing. You expect prying eyes, secrecy, and suspicion. What you don’t expect is the friendly welcome from strangers and family, the chaos at the airport, the sheer number of women in black hijab everywhere you look.

The first week you are in Iran is a revelation. Everyone you meet speaks to you. Strangers try out a few words of English, speak to you in simple Persian. They express opinions. Slam the government. Make jokes about clerics. Shout out: We love you miss, in heavily accented English.

There are people and cars everywhere. You see women in sheer headscarves braving the treacherous pavement in high heels and challenging the limits of acceptable hijab. You see daredevil teenagers roller blading in and out of traffic and up and down the cement steps in Tehran’s largest park.

Read more at Article 19.

Cringeworthy (part 2 of 3)

Close up of Marching through Georgia, by S.M. Stirling

What is it about writing so powerful that it evokes a physical reaction from the reader?  Beyond cringing, the best and most memorable writing made me exhibit other physical effects that I began classifying in my previous entry and have continued here:

Insomnia

SF, fantasy, and alt history author S.M. Stirling wrote a trilogy of books in the 1980 and 90s that are now referred to as the Domination saga - a dystopian alternate history where a militaristic, slave-holding "anti-America" in an industrialized Africa conquers Europe, Asia, and finally - the world.

In Stirling's books, the British Cape Colony of Drakia (our South Africa) absorbed far more Loyalist refugees that in our world after the American Revolution, as well countless refugees from the Confederacy during America's Civil War. Culturally embittered by this defeat, the descendants of these settlers begin their systematic conquest, enslavement, and industrialization of Africa.

When the first book, Marching Through Georgia begins, The Colony of Drakia has become "The Domination of the Draka" - a society based on conquest now in pursuit of territory and resources during the "Eurasian War" (their world's version World War II). What ensues in this first book is a graphic account of small-unit combat between elite Draka airborne soldiers (male and female) accompanied by an American journalist, against armored regiment of German Waffen-SS in the Caucasus - with the occasional Soviet partisan thrown in.

Don't let the cover fool you. Yes, this is pulpy military fiction, but what's riveting is the fascinating and horrific world Stirling has created. He has given us the Confederate States of America that could have been: a world of lush plantations and dehumanizing factory towns; a refined ruling class that preserve natural beauty even as their mines dispose of broken workers as they do slurry. Stirling has taken great pains to describe this civilization, economy, social mores, history, and a culture influenced by European immigrants such as Nietzsche (when the Draka still accepted outsiders). Stirling even creates a dialect of English embossed by Confederate descendants.

In the second book, Under the Yoke, the Domination has gained control of Eurasia from the English Channel to the East China Sea. While ostensibly a Le Carre-style story of an OSS man on a mission behind enemy lines, Under the Yoke is really a study of the society the Draka begin establishing in Europe. The picture he paints isn't a pretty one. On a broad level, European institutions, moral leadership, and education are wiped out. On the ground level, the reader must witness the awful repercussions of warfare since ancient times wreaked on the protagonists - destruction, rape, pillage, torture - not as some tragic byproduct of Draka conquest, but as a cornerstone of Draka policy. Their culture is conquest, and they've turned domination into a science. The hapless Europeans (foremost among them a Polish nun, who's forced into servitude as a clerk on a new plantation) stand no chance. The remaining free people on earth realize too late that the rules of warfare, decency or simply mercy do not apply to Stirling's Draka. They are unconquerable Spartans. They are the Roman Empire at its peak, but unlike the Romans, they're not going to fall. Once they master genetic engineering in the third book The Stone Dogs, they become the true Supermen of Nietzsche's dreams.

Seeing the yoke applied so personally, step-by-painful-step in Under the Yoke and the third book The Stone Dogs, was physically exhausting. There is simply no hope, and it's awful watching one protagonist after another fail and perish. I found myself wide awake at night, poking holes in Stirling's assumptions and postulations: how could their weapons development be so much better than America's? How could they have conquered Afghanistan and China when no one else has done so (and successfully held it)? How could they not fall apart from within? How could they be so bereft of mercy or human decency?

Although Stirling does answer some of these within the books (and other authors tackle them in the anthology entitled Drakas!) the author has taken great pains to point out that it is - after all - a dystopia. This is the story where everything does go wrong for the good guys. It says it right there on the cover "You don't know how lucky you are boys." Perhaps that's the source of my insomnia: the darkest dreams alway bear a frightening resemblance to waking reality.

To make it worse, Stone Dogs and the Drakas! anthology (and a fourth throwaway SF book called Drakon) explain how the Draka have also mastered inter-dimensional travel. The authors don't playfully suggest that the Draka might leap out of a wormhole into our world; they warn us that they're already here.

As if I didn't already have enough trouble sleeping.

- Chris


Next entry: plaatsvervangende schaamte thanks to Jonathan Franzen.

Cringeworthy (Part 1 of 3)

American Psycho, by Brett Easton Ellis (UK 1st edition)

What is it about writing so powerful that it evokes a physical reaction from the reader? I don't refer to the cheap thrills of an airport purchase or arousal from a dime store bodice ripper, I mean fiction that pulls you in and doesn't let go. I mean writing that sets up a character, a scene, and a plot that is so convincing,  so effective, that you cringed while reading. Okay, maybe you didn't cringe, but perhaps you had to take a deep breath before continuing, or maybe you put it down and walked away. I've cringed, but amongst the best writing I've exhibited a number of physical effects beyond cringing. I've finally decided to classify my symptoms along with the authors who caused my distress:

Nausea, cold sweat, vertigo

When the blade and the blood first appear in American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis, it's only after you've been lulled by the first 100 or so pages of the glamorous-yet-rote life of a yuppie investment banker in 1980s Manhattan. Patrick Bateman seems to have it all: a cushy, high-profile job, a string of girlfriends, and a fine apartment on the Upper West Side. In reality he's miserable, in a cutthroat race with his peers to have the finest business cards, the newest electronic equipment, and the hottest reservations in town. As with any race for consumption, Patrick is destined to lose. He seems to know this, and his anguish, fears, and frustration regularly erupt in fits of predatory violence.

He starts by spontaneously victimizing a homeless man and his dog. From there, the violence - mostly premeditated - escalates in quantity, intensity, and sadism. There's usually a pause in between each orgy of butchery - perhaps a visit to a new restaurant, or a work out session - but then the body count resumes its climb: street walkers, high-end call girls, prep school girlfriends (Bateman conflates all the three), yuppie competitors, an unfortunate jellyfish, and even the occasional cop.

Nothing is left to the imagination here. To paraphrase Scott McCloud, the reader is not a silent accomplice to crimes happening "off-camera," instead the reader is a silent witness, helpless while reading very clinical descriptions of torture and finally murder. While it's possible to make it unscathed through a singular scene, the pointless - and apparently plotless (at least at the outset) - violence is unrelenting, and has a cumulative effect on the stomach and psyche. For me, there was no fighting the urge to put the book down, get some fresh air, talk to other people, and tell myself everything was gonna be all right.

The consume-brag-dismay-kill zoetrope plays over and over, until you realize that it's Bateman's tacit, reluctant acceptance of his life that is the story. Despite his despicable nature, it was difficult for me to completey hate Patrick Bateman. Perhaps it's the alienation he suffers as an anti-God. Perhaps it's the remote chance that he hasn't committed these killings at all - except in his head. That you can somehow sympathize with a creature who lashes out (consequence-free) at a world he's seemingly trapped in is a tribute to Ellis' writing.

I may read it again one day, to determine if he really kills or not. It may be a while, though. Years later, it's still hard for me to look at German brushed steel kitchen appliances or high thread count luxury bed sheets once the mind's eye has seen them with splattered human fat and dripping, atramentous ichor.

Chronic itchiness / sensation of bugs crawling on your skin

Basically, anything written by Irvine Welsh is enough to make you shift in you seat as if you've got crotch rot. Trainspotting is the obvious top contender for its detailed explanations of the ins-and-outs of heroin use. Do you know what kinds of scabs and abscesses can form on the skin when you shoot too long and too often in the same spot on your arm? Or between your toes? Or on your penis? Aficionados of Welsh will demand places on the podium for the necrophilia and bestiality in Acid House, the terrible skin and colonic conditions of the dirty cop in Filth, or the pub porn and rape in Porno.

Heroin. Coke. Ecstasy. Sex. Power. No matter the drug of choice in his novels, novellas, and short stories, Irvine Welsh's true talent lies in his ability to give you a colorful character who's life is a runaway train headed for the buffers. His stories have forced me to laugh and cringe on a number of levels. The gun that goes off at the end of each story is right there in plain sight - one last score that can't go wrong, one last drink, or a chance for revenge - and I itch like mad waiting for the self-destructive protagonist to reach for it. When it finally goes off with its usual disastrous consequences, the character gives a figurative shrug of the shoulders. They may be dead, widowed, dismembered, banished, or incarcerated, but they "didnae gie a fuck" in the first place. "Ye ken?"

In his 2009 anthology, Reheated Cabbage, Welsh dials it back a bit, but he still can't let Trainspotting favorite Francis Begbie get through Christmas lunch without chinning his sister's boyfriend. (I laughed aloud at that one; it was like a high school reunion where the crazy kid shows up and is still reliably crazy.) He does grant reprieve to two other recurring characters in the short story "I am Miami." Oh sure, they're still self-destructive - what with their drink and drug abuse - but the repercussions at the climax of the story (during a rave) are buffeted by a sensible girlfriend and their fearsome grammar school teacher - Albert Black, who's inadvertantly come along for the ride. Perhaps even Irvine Welsh himself has become exhausted by nihilism, and finally made a little room for redemption?

Next entry: Insomnia with S.M. Stirling and plaatsvervangende schaamte thanks to Jonathan Franzen.

- Chris

The Brussels Sprouts of Science Fiction

Don't worry. This isn't a post about Killer Tomatoes or their equivalent. (Not that there's anything wrong with loving B-films. Killer Tomatoes have their place.)

I sometimes like to think of sci-fi books as food, since they are, in essence, food for the brain (or food for thought, if you will). Things like comic books and Star Trek novelettes and quirky/kitchy anthologies organized around a central hokey theme are fun. They are the pop tarts and candy bars of the sci-fi world. My unrefined brain-palate could graze on these all day and never tire (It's true. There have definitely been days I have spent in bed or on park benches just devouring this stuff.)

But my problem is that I have super-smart friends. The kind of friends with discriminating tastes. They only consume the pineapple-glazed seitan cutlets and brussels sprouts of science fiction. They know their Assimov from their Bova, and have memorized passages of Ursula Le Guin just because they liked the way the words fit together to describe a concept. Every now and then we chat Lovecraft (for he's one of the rare writers who is both pop tart and brussels sprout), but by and large I embarass them with my geeky love for sci fi with questionable literary merit.

And when the embarassment gets to be too bad, I am punished with a brussels sprouts assignmnet. I promised a friend I would read any book they thought I really couldn't afford to be without.

My friend chose Robert Heinlein's 1966 novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. And I did it. While I can tear through several books of pop tart sci-fi in a day if left to my own devices, this book took me two weeks to complete. It's a hard book. The people of the lunar colony Heinlein writes about have their own Loony language, who use it in unique ways, kind of like how the characters in A Clockwork Orange did. This, plus the super-detailed and slow-moving plot meant that  my brain had to engage with this sci-fi in a whole new way.

But you know what? Like brussels sprouts, it was good for me. The slow pace allowed me the time to digest the complications in plot and character, and to think about the core tenets of sci-fi. By the time I finished the book, I had a new found appreciation for the grandfathers of the genre. They are the ones who created the tropes and set the parameters and showed writers that we could demand more from their works, and readers that we could demand more from the work of others.

Having read Heinlein, I feel that I have a better understanding of how the genre has developed throughout history, and I think this will make me a better sci-fi writer. Just like how modern philosophers have to start off with The Allegory of the Cave, so do modern sci-fi writers have to pay their dues and understand how it began in order to take it into new and uncharted territory.

The Balkans: the Original Ground Zero

In the aftermath of 9/11, sales of the Koran in the United States increased dramatically. While perhaps signifying a positive and peaceful attempt at understanding, it's a laborious path if not a misguided one.  Absent the history, absent the political and cultural context, reading rote excerpts of the Koran likely won't likely tell you too much about Muslims in Indonesia, Albania, and North America anymore than reading Leviticus chapter 20 will deliver the Christian world's homogenous views on homosexuality.

A better approach would be to study part of the world where the two religions lived side-by-side - or at least on top of one another: the Balkans. The Bridge on the Drina, by Ivo Andric takes geo-politics down to the Google street view- to the Mehmed Pasa Sokolovic Bridge over the Drina river - to effectively document the history and emotion of 400 years of religious coexistence and conflict.

Andric takes us through a deceptively leisurely journey through the centuries, from the bridges construction in the 1500s to the onset of the Great War. The deception is that every vignette, every detail is not casual or leisurely, but absolutely deliberate in that it conveys the history, political context, and cultural context that all those new Koran reader sought - along with humanity and emotion and a story.

Andric paints a seemingly incongruous picture of Turkish rule, magnanimity punctuated by absolute brutality viz. the seemingly rote description of the sentence of impalement carried out on the bridge. Despite the despotism and some last-minute Oriental cruelty (nailing someone to the bridge by their ear) as the Austro-Hungarian army approaches, the end of Turkish rule is depicted almost ruefully by the narrator:

"About midday, [the Austrians] fired a few shells from the shelter of a little wood at the deserted caravanserai. They damaged the already ruined han and destroyed those exceptionally fine window grilles, each cut from a single piece of soft stone."

Perhaps change is rued simply because the Balkans are a part of the world where conflict appears to be the only measure of progress, where religion is just another manner of tribal affiliation.

Boiling down so much complexity into the happenings on this bridge, Andric captures a fundamental moment of transition from Eastern to Western rule, including a meeting between the town 'notables' (representatives of the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities as well as an academic) and the Austro-Hungarian army colonel (derogatorily referred to as "Schwabes," which is amusing if you speak German). An excerpt from the proceeding chapter as the mechanisms of the new empire are slowly put in place:

"What most astonished the people of the town and filled them with wonder and distrust was not so much their numbers as their immense and incomprehensible plans, their untiring industry and the perseverance with which they proceeded to the realisation of those plans. The newcomers were never at peace; and they allowed no one else to live in peace. It seemed that they were resolved with their impalpable yet ever more noticeable web of laws, regulations and orders to embrace all forms of life, men, beasts and things, and to change and alter everything, both the outward appearance of the town and the customs and habits of men from the cradle to the grave..."

As the Turks (and the Serbs) still living in town attempt to unsuccessfully withdraw themselves from the encroaching bureaucracy that mercilessly governs the length and width of market stalls, what they hunt, and which trees they chop down, the bright shining lines still between East and West, between the rule of tradition and the rule of law, between passion and calculation, and between mysticism and corporate efficiency - is illuminated.