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How to Critique: Best Practices for Workshopping

Abstract image to accompany blog post about critiquing stories by speculative fiction writer Cat Rambo.
If you're interested in getting your stories workshopped, click on this picture in order to find out more about My Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction Stories online class. There's also an Advanced Workshop, as well as classes focusing on individual aspects of writing, like description, characters, and fleshing out stories.
Both my Writing F&SF Stories and Advanced workshops offer students a chance to critique and be critiqued. To my mind, the latter is actually more useful, because being forced to articulate one’s position on an aspect of writing can be enlightening and instructive. With that in mind, here’s some best practices for such workshops.

Overall:

  1. Start with what works. Let the writer know what you see as the story’s strengths and how they might capitalize on them.
  2. What keeps you from connecting with the story? What don’t you understand? Sometimes the most useful thing you can give someone is a brief synopsis of what you think is going on in the story, because it may not match their intent.
  3. Critique big ticket items, not little nitpicks.
  4. It’s more important to point out what’s broken than to make suggestions how to fix it, because that fix will differ radically from writer to writer.
  5. How do the beginning and ending work together to create a satisfying story? Is the story that’s provided the one the one promised in the beginning? Is the ending set up in a satisfying way? Is it the result of character actions?
  6. What’s missing? What don’t you understand?
  7. What seems extraneous, unneeded or distracting?
  8. What’s the pacing like? Where does the story drag and where does it skip too quickly through details?
  9. Where are the info-dumps and how can that information be spread out?
  10. How well does the title work? If not well, what possible better titles can be drawn from the story?

Characters:

  1. Are the characters likeable?
  2. Are the characters acting or reacting?
  3. Does the character have a point of identification with the reader, such as a problem, situation or want that both of them hold?
  4. Where can we go deeper into the character’s head? Does the reader know what the character wants? Where don’t we understand what the character is doing?
  5. Are there too many characters? Can any be combined?
  6. Is the dialogue interesting and informative of character?
  7. Is the point of view consistent?

World:

  1. Is the world clear? Does the reader know where they are?
  2. Does it feel generic? (Is it?) How can it be made more specific and evocative?
  3. Does it make sense?
  4. How important is the science of it? Are the facts right?
  5. Where should we know more?
  6. Where can the world come forward more?
  7. Where can more sensory detail be worked in?
  8. Is the culture interesting and also make sense?

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

~K. Richardson

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The One Twitter List You Should Be Keeping

Image that says 1) Tweet 2) ??? 3) Profit
If this is all that your social media plan consists of, you may want to put more time and thought into it.
Are you a writer on Twitter because you’ve been told you need to be on there? Are you trying to establish “a social media presence” while not quite sure what that involves? Relax and don’t worry. Twitter can be easy and often a lot of fun as well as useful, as long as you take the time to learn some of the basics for Twitter use.

One useful tool for making the most of Twitter is the list feature, where you can sort a subset of your followers into their own group. If you’ve never used it, you may want to start by reading through Twitter’s own basic tutorial on lists.

Twitter lists are a great feature that are worth making the most of. I’ve got a few set up for industry professionals, close friends on Twitter, members of various writing groups and organizations, former students, and people in a variety of fields. But there’s one that is more important than any of the others.

Building Your Followers

A pack of followers made up of people who followed you back because you followed them is not a particularly useful list. You want followers who retweet your content, help spread your message, and who provide interesting and useful content that you may want to share in turn. For this reason, it’s worth putting a few minutes each day into maintaining it. I use two tools to help me do this: Buffer and Justunfollow.

Buffer allows me to schedule tweets (which I also like because I can post stuff when not around and find new followers that way). When I initially post a link to a blogpost, for example, I can go ahead and set up a couple of additional mentions further on down the line. More importantly, I use Buffer when doing my daily follower check, looking to see who’s following me that I want to follow back. I look at each new follower’s tweets and usually favorite a couple or find tweets that I want to retweet, sticking them in my Buffer queue. (I should note that I am not using the free version of Buffer but the next version up, which lets me schedule roughly ten days of tweets in advance.

Who I Don’t Follow Back

I don’t follow everyone back automatically. Here’s the list that’s evolved over time of profiles I don’t bother following back:

  • Sell, sell, sell. Is your stream full of nothing but links to your book on Amazon? Then I’m probably not worrying about.
  • Nonexistent. No photo, no background info, no tweets? I’m not going to bother.
  • Promising me social media success. I’m not buying Twitter followers, nor am I paying for expensive seminars that tell me things that are common sense.
  • Hate speech. That should, I think, go without saying.

Disagree with me politically? That’s fine. I enjoy conversation. Post nothing but silly puns or kitten pictures? I’m fine with that. I’m even good with total nonsense. This sorting stage is where I build a lot of my lists, though not that crucial one I want to talk about. That one comes later.

The Interactives List

Lists are a terrifically useful feature of Twitter, allowing you to create subgroupsand view tweetstreams made up of only tweets from people on that list. Many of my lists are devoted to either a specific group like former students or players of a MUD I used to work with or an industry niche, like book reviewers or editors. And then there’s the most important list of all.

This list is top of my heap and it’s titled Interactives, for people that interact, who RT and reply and generally signal boost. I try to periodically thank people for RTing, which means running through who’s done it recently, and I add people to it at that point. The people on that list have demonstrated that they enjoy my content and want to spread my message. That’s a very good reason for working at building a relationship with them.

When I’m just poking at Twitter, looking to see what interesting conversations are happening or what content is noteworthy or a good candidate for retweeting, I go to that list first. If I’m filling up my Buffer stream with some interesting content, I can find it there, and continue to build the relationship while also giving my followers interesting and/or entertaining content.

If you’re worried about it getting too cluttered, run the tool I mentioned, Justunfollow, periodically to weed out people not following you back and inactives. That should do the trick for all but the most popular of Tweeters.

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Tracking 2011

I posted earlier that I’d had nineteen stories published in 2011, and John asked for some particulars. Here they are, in a post that tries to sum up what I -did- in 2011. 🙂

I finished two large fiction projects. The first was a collaboration where the other participant dropped out, and I ended up finishing the book. I would estimate that I wrote between 50-60 thousand words on this, and it went through two sets of revisions. It’s currently being shopped around.

The second was a reworking of an earlier novel into a trilogy. I mapped this out and divvied up the existing content, and finished the first volume, which involved about 70 thousand words of new content. A goal for 2012 is to finish the second volume. It’s currently being looked at by a publisher, and I think it’s the best thing I ever wrote, so I hope to sell it this year.

I did some editing work as well, which I’ll talk about at another time.

Statistics:
Number of submissions: 32 in 2011, which is actually much lower than (imo) it should be, and which I hope to double in 2012
Number of acceptances: 18
Most rejections garnered by an accepted piece: 10 for Flicka, which is a very odd story and ended up appearing in SUBVERSION. Also notable is Whose Face This Is, I Do Not Know, which appeared in Clarkesworld after eight other rejections (clearly I should have sent it to them much earlier, but I was thinking of it as a horror piece)

New stories written (not counting flash, which I did a bad job of tracking):

  • A Querulous Flute of Bone ““ written to spec
  • Do The Right Thing ““ written at an editor’s request, who then turned it down, just rewrote and sent out for the first time
  • Five Ways To Fall In Love on Planet Porcelain ““ currently in circulation
  • Logic and Magic in the Time of the Boat Lifts (collaboration with Ben Burgis) ““ currently in circulation
  • Pumpkin Knight ““ Codex contest story, reworking before it goes anywhere
  • Talking in the Night ““ needs polishing before it goes out

Last year was actually a little unproductive in terms of stories. This year I’ve already finished: 1) a 1000 word piece for a children’s market, 2) “Space Elevator Music” (flash), 3) “Love’s Footsteps,” a S&S piece that I’m reading at Confusion this week and then sending to BCS. I’ve got a slew of half-finished stuff that I’m taking to the con as well, because sometimes I get very productive during my solo time at cons.

In 2011, I pulled one story from a market who had had it way too long and got a nice note from the editor about how the wait would make the pro sale that much sweeter when I got it and letting me know that the more professional the market, the longer I should expect to wait. I moved said market to the top of my “do not submit to these people” list.

Stories that appeared in 2011:

*This is the story I am pushing for award notice, but other notables are “Whose Face This Is I Do Not Know” and “Love, Resurrected.”

Some notes on my submission process:

I have four criteria for market that help determine whether or not I submit to them, which are pay rate, reply time, whether they take e-subs, and how much notice they get. Something that’s high in one category may compensate for something in another category ““ Tor.com’s pay rate versus the slow reply time, for example, or the amount of notice F&SF gets versus the pain in the rear nature of printing out a paper submission (it has become the only magazine I’m willing to do this for, though).

Sometimes I send things to a specific market because I wrote it with them in mind. This is what happened with “Clockwork Fairies,” which appeared in Tor.com because the first market turned it down. Occurrences like this are not uncommon. I mention this only to increase my own mystique and make editors more eager to grab my stories when they appear, but I am afraid my prolific nature works against me in this regard.

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