Showing posts with label writing advice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing advice. Show all posts
Monday, October 10, 2011
Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? Common Peer Review Mistakes and their Overlap with Critique Groups
While some of the common "mistakes" in this video are specific to an oral critique, paired peer situation, there are others that are common to any critiquing relationship. Are you a Picky Patty, a Mean Margaret, or a Defensive Dave? Have you ever been critiqued by a Pushy Paula or by Jean the Generalizer?
Conversely, what characterizes effective writing feedback? How do you know when a critique partnership is working, and when is it time to let go? And what are your best tips for handling writing advice?
Friday, March 19, 2010
Why Paint-by-Number Writing Never Works
Before I began putting my stories down on paper, I absolutely loved to spend long hours drawing and painting. Since both my great-grandmother and my uncle were talented amateur painters, my parents had some inkling how to encourage me. So from an early age, there were pads of paper, watercolors, brushes and even a couple of art lessons and an easel.
Then they clapped onto the idea of buying me some of those nifty new paint by numbers that were still quite popular in the early Seventies. The idea, I'm sure, was that ladling the "correct" colors into the numbered spaces would not only making painting a "masterpiece" easy, but would teach the child (or adult) creativity.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I found them horribly disappointing. The end result looked flat and lifeless, and I didn't get any real satisfaction from the dumbed-down task of coloring in someone else's drawing with someone else's choices.
Paint-by-number writing, where writers attempt to blindly follow a formula for creating marketable fiction (often genre fiction) without making it their own, doesn't work any better. Without creative choices, without that most important, least-quantifiable ingredient, love, swirled into the mix, the work comes out as flat, lifeless, and in many cases condescending as the worst of the boxed art kits. The reading audience instinctively knows when it is being talked down to, and agents and editors are particularly good at sniffing out this sin... and issuing lightning-swift rejections.
But a writer aiming for a particular marketing niche can go too far with creative choices -- so far that the painting spills far beyond the frame. That's why it's so important to read, read, read recent examples of the type of book you're writing. If you don't, you'll fail to absorb the basic audience expectations. You can bend, tweak, twist, and play with these parameters, but ignore them at your own risk.
So if you're writing toward a particular market, try to ferret out the boundaries. But paint with those distinctive colors that only you bring to the process, and don't be afraid to bump playfully, joyfully, or even defiantly against the borders of your frame.
Then they clapped onto the idea of buying me some of those nifty new paint by numbers that were still quite popular in the early Seventies. The idea, I'm sure, was that ladling the "correct" colors into the numbered spaces would not only making painting a "masterpiece" easy, but would teach the child (or adult) creativity.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I found them horribly disappointing. The end result looked flat and lifeless, and I didn't get any real satisfaction from the dumbed-down task of coloring in someone else's drawing with someone else's choices.
Paint-by-number writing, where writers attempt to blindly follow a formula for creating marketable fiction (often genre fiction) without making it their own, doesn't work any better. Without creative choices, without that most important, least-quantifiable ingredient, love, swirled into the mix, the work comes out as flat, lifeless, and in many cases condescending as the worst of the boxed art kits. The reading audience instinctively knows when it is being talked down to, and agents and editors are particularly good at sniffing out this sin... and issuing lightning-swift rejections.
But a writer aiming for a particular marketing niche can go too far with creative choices -- so far that the painting spills far beyond the frame. That's why it's so important to read, read, read recent examples of the type of book you're writing. If you don't, you'll fail to absorb the basic audience expectations. You can bend, tweak, twist, and play with these parameters, but ignore them at your own risk.
So if you're writing toward a particular market, try to ferret out the boundaries. But paint with those distinctive colors that only you bring to the process, and don't be afraid to bump playfully, joyfully, or even defiantly against the borders of your frame.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
"Get out!" Garrison Keillor's best advice for writers
Writer/tale teller/national treasure Garrison Keillor has this to say as we prepare to begin another work week:
And also this about diversity and academic intolerance for genre fiction:
And also this about diversity and academic intolerance for genre fiction:
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