Editing – Author Shlomi Harif

On Critique Groups and Feedback

shlomi on December 14, 2024

I’ve had fortunate luck in learning and giving feedback on pieces. When I lived in Israel, there was a poetry critique group that, while it was more of a “you finish, we applaud politely” kind of place, people did provide feedback. They also had a yearly English-language chapbook, and the poetry quality was pretty good. A separate tiny group met in my apartment every month or so and sat and wrote more than workshopped, but I got to hear feedback from potential readers, at least.

Fast forward to moving to Austin in the early 90s. There was an insular group called Turkey City that met, but I had no “in” to get involved. There was — and still is — Slugtribe. For a baby fiction writer (I’d started transitioning to short story and novel form), it was great: bring up to 5k words with lots of copies, everyone reads silently, then there’s a critiquing discussion, and the author gets all the written feedback when it’s over.

My first time presenting, I brought a chunk of a manuscript I’d been working on for several years. I was proud of it, my friends who’d read it liked what they’d seen, and the prose was perfect. Looking back on it, the critiquing was gentle–but it took me a few months to summon the courage to go to another meeting. For people new to critiquing, bringing their lovely children for review can be traumatic. But persevere I did, and I’m grateful for the time spent in the group.

While Slugtribe was and is awesome (thanks in large part to Wendy Wheeler!), it’s an open group, so the critique members consist of those who show up that night. Ditto for the quality of the writing, which ranged from awesome to the neophyte. (Slugtribe supports several now-published alums, including Patrice Sarath, Paige E. Ewing, Nicky Drayden, Elizabeth Moon, and the prolific Marshall Ryan Maresca,) I was just starting to write A Day at the Zoo and wanted feedback from folks with more experience and, hopefully, published experience.

I started looking for something at a more professional critique level by mid-2015. One member linked me up with group she was in, where most members were game designers past or present and some very sharp critiquers. And most published authors of one kind or another. This is a closed group, meaning one needs to be invited, and there are the usual hazing and mystic ceremonies to bring one in. Or not. It meets weekly for several hours, so there’s continuity of people’s writing as well as the critiquers. And cookies, let’s not forget those.

The pandemic moved the group from its very comfortable living room to discord, a new experience for many. It allowed us, however, to cast a net for members broadly. We have about a dozen active members, and we’ve been privileged to provide feedback on manuscripts that are now on sale at a bookstore near you or online.

The word I use to describe it is “safe.” Not safe as in gentle criticism–that’s a blunt, honest, and sometimes puzzling thing. It’s safe because we can bring our pieces, whatever the quality of editing or genre, and not feel attacked or personally criticized. And when the critiquing gets rough, it might feel that way in a group where we don’t know each other comfortably well. We met en masse for the first time at the last ArmadilloCon in Austin. Eleven folks, many meeting for the first time. It was lovely. And the critiquing was no less rigorous that week.

All this is to say, if you’re serious about your writing, don’t believe your own press as to how good the material is; find a group, any group at first, to get feedback. There are online communities like Scribophile, which have “get critiques as you give them” bartering, but they also have whole-novel sessions with a set group of people. Like Slugtribe, this is an open forum, but it’s easy to read another author’s critiquing of other work to see if their feedback is relevant to your writing.

All this to say, there’s an article about critique groups at Authors Publish that might give you a good look at this essential part of writing: https://authorspublish.com/lectures/the-art-of-getting-feedback-on-your-writing/.

Happy Holidays!

Manuscripts vs. Entropy

shlomi on August 1, 2021

I’m prepping a manuscript (Last Run) for shopping, after a HUGE number of great changes suggested by the White Gold Wielders writers group here in Austin. Having one’s novel read and commented on in group format is a blessing I would hope for all my novels.

I fired up Scrivener, started making changes, moved from my laptop to my desktop, and Uncle Murphy struck. The result: A few dozen “recovered” files, blank scenes where once text resided. What’s been updated? What’s had changes? Between a Word copy used for the group discussion, a text comparison tool, and a lot of careful scrutiny of the recovered files, I was able to bring the manuscript back to wholeness, with only one scene flagged as “deleted right before the crash–” and therefore not an issue.

Save. Save again. Save yet more. One of the first things a writer learns is “keep a backup.” I have Dropbox, exports to Word, saved zip files of scrivener folder structures for major edits. And still, Murphy manages to get a word in edgewise. Or at least cost me three hours of quality time repairing, because things went splat at exactly the wrong time.

Baby Novelist Issues: Writing Myself Into a Knot

shlomi on August 23, 2018

I’m 116,000 words into a SF novel. It’s got great tech, interesting characters, action and thrills… and no motivation for bad guy actions. Well, it did, when I started. But the pitfall of pantsing is getting pulled off course, one degree at at time. (And when writing about matters aeronautical, there’s three dimensions to those degrees. But I diverge from the point.)

Part of how I got here is because of the aforementioned fun aspects. It takes time to tell those complicated battle scenes, the points where relationships change, key threads weave a novel together. And writing little notes to myself on the virtual margins on what to change on the first draft edits kept up my velocity. I just needed to remember all the facts and events changing in their later retelling from their initial description earlier in the book.

For instance, I realize in scene thirty that Maura’s got to have combat experience. She’s already written in with anger issues, but when her background was discussed in scene five, that big deal didn’t come up. No problem: write a note to rewrite history.

However, when “change requests” for the manuscript get past a certain point, the rewrite gets uglier and uglier. Which brings me to a pile of actions and plot twists now blowing in the breeze of a torn zeppelin at forty thousand feet, as the gore of two shootouts and two bombings dry in the thin air. What was worth their conflict, their deaths? What drives them to continue, at so high a human cost?

Oh, you don’t know either? Some fourth wall you all are!

I need to bite the bullet, put in all the noted changes (84, from trivial word or location replacements to “why’d they do it” types of changes), and then take a look at character motivations and see how it all fits together. {picks up chainsaw, chisel, flamethrower, and flyswatter and heads back in…}

Amid, Among, Between, Betwixt

shlomi on May 23, 2018

Just signed up for the 2018 Agents & Editors Conference here in Austin. Last minute. Second year going. Wasn’t going to, but after working on a single query letter for the better part of the day, I might as well see if I can’t catch an agent’s eye. Researching each participating agent and editor took a few hours, but that’ll come in handy as I stalk the Wild Agent at the conference. I’m also gonna do a toss-at-the-buzzer pitch of my larger novel, Last Run, to one or two victims agents that might have an appetite for it. Of course, that means cleaning that puppy up too, before June’s end.

This interrupted writing madly a piece to submit for the ArmadilloCon Writers’ Workshop. I think this is my last year that I’ll submit. I’ve gotten quite a lot out of it but the panel sessions were where I got the most bang for my conference buck. And hopefully I can assist next year.

All this while getting the first “Angels” book cleaned up enough to send to agents. Meeting tonight with one of my writing groups for dinner and last revisions before last cleanup. And find a title. It’d be great if I had something to call it aside from a word unrelated to the story.

Book two in the series is done, at least in first draft. And #3 is already starting to come into focus in my head, so I’m getting character journeys and the larger arc or three sketched out.

And all the above is while my fascination with a paying, full-time day job increases. Doing an application right can take an hour or two for each one.

Life. Gotta love it.

When the plot goes out of control

shlomi on April 22, 2018

Writing this article is a way for me to procrastinate yet another major revision to my current manuscript. But it’s a learning moment for me, that’s worth sharing.

Being able to write without editing is hard for most folks to do, and pushing through that barrier makes writing… not effortless, but at least doable. There’s more creative energy available to move the plot forward.

The downside to writing first and editing later (there are many upsides) is that one can veer off the intended path. sometimes it’s a character tugging at my hand saying “check this out; I can do this, too!” Or it’s a place with gravitas sufficient to move more action to it, or from it, or because of it.

My first tear-down in this manuscript was after creating a mass casualty event. A natural progression of the actions of some characters, actually. But this is a murder-mystery, not a Bruce Willis flick. And I ended up with the chaos that typically happens after a disaster of the “dozens dead, hundreds injured” variety. And while I got about eleven thousand possibly reusable words from it, ultimately I pulled it, and the six or seven new characters introduced at about the 60k mark, out of the manuscript.

I’m now past the 70k mark. this is where things should be coming together. The number of threads decreasing, the tension focusing on who did it, and what’s the protagonist going to do about it.

Now’s also the time I’m realizing I’ve got an extra suspect. He’s threaded throughout the story, Hinted at, a cause of trauma, of mystery… I’d already edited him out of the beginning, because even I couldn’t figure out what his motives were for his actions, cool as they looked when the protagonist came across them. To me he felt like Richard Kiel in Moonraker. Interesting, glitterly, but almost a one trick pony in terms of evil. I could have made him more evil, more important. But I kept butting into the fact that he wasn’t fitting in with a smooth narrative. Other detectives kept tripping over him. He added a complexity to the search for the murderers that I had to divert time and words to explaining.

So goodbye, Evan Stone. May you appear in another novel, in a different guise. And perhaps in a nicer role; I really didn’t like this version of you.

On Span of Memory and Tools

shlomi on February 20, 2017

Last week a fellow writer was discussing the trouble with editing a document that had been laid down for a while. Keeping the entire novel in one’s head, the writer said, was important when making edits with large blocks of text (e.g., changing scenes and chapters around). This was said in the context of using Microsoft Word vs. something like Scrivener, which I’m currently test-driving.

Word maintains a single document. And while one may use heading levels to delineate parts, chapters, and scenes, a large manuscript can get unwieldy. Scrivener and other scene-compartmentalized software tools make it relatively easy to shuffle around the various scenes or chapters, but if a writer wants, for example, to move parts of three scenes into two other scenes elsewhere, there’s a lot of cutting and pasting and remembering what scene is where that’s involved. Add to the text being edited ‘cold,’ it seems to me that the specialized tools would almost require quite a bit of cold reading and flipping around to scenes.

I’m still making my mind up about the Scrivener software, but I’ve got two strategies for writing large texts using word: multiple documents, and headings. I’ve written 130k+ word documents with no more than having a Heading 1 reserved for manuscript, characters, locations, objects, kipple, and research. Then chapters are at the Heading 2-level and Heading is for scenes. Having an automatically generated table of contents at the beginning makes hopping around easy. Outline mode views and automatic outlining can also help, but I don’t use the latter two.

A variant is to put each novel component into its own file (e.g., a folder with the novel, characters, research, and locations).

The important thing isn’t the tool, is comfort with it. Every new keystroke combination that requires learning is time not spent writing. And that means writers will usually be most comfortable with the general document editor (e.g., MS Word) rather than a specialty software package. My $0.02, so far.