Quote of the Week and the Week to Come

No tears in the writer;  No tears in the reader.

No surprise for the writer; No surprise for the reader. 

                                                             ~Robert Frost

Robert Frost Source: Wikipedia

Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was one of the most popular and critically respected American poets of the twentieth century.

This week on Writing from the Peak:


Nov. 7     Letter from the Editor, Donnell Ann Bell


Nov. 9     Pikes Peak Writers History Column by Jason Evans


Nov. 11   Sweet Success Farewell & Introduction

Pikes Peak Writers November Events

Write Brain Nov 15, 2016 — 6:30 PM at 8:30 PM

What:  The State of the Short Story
Who:  R.T. Lawton
When: November 15, 6:30-8:30 pm
Where: Venue@21c (upper floor, to the right if coming in the upper entrance) of Library 21c, 1175 Chapel Hills Dr. Colorado Springs, CO 80920

More Information: Can you make a living writing short stories? How do they stack up compared to a novel for money, prestige and anything else? Can you integrate them with a novel? What’s the short story market? Learn the answers to these and any other short story questions you bring to the meeting. Also get some writing and networking tips to help you towards getting published.

About the Presenter: R.T. Lawton is a retired federal law enforcement agent, a past member of the Mystery Writers of America board of directors and a two-time Derringer nominee with over 100 short stories in various publications, to include Blood on the Bayou (2016 Bouchercon anthology), The Mystery Box ( 2013 MWA anthology), And All Our Yesterdays anthology, Who Died in Here? anthology, the West Coast Crime Wave anthology, Deadwood Magazine,Easyriders, Outlaw Biker, Woman’s World magazine, and 36 sold to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. He also has four e-collections at Amazon.com and at Smashwords for other e-readers. You may have attended one of his Surveillance Workshops at various writers conferences.

Writer’s Night Nov 28, 2016 — 6:30 PM at 8:30 PM

Location: Kawa Coffee, 2427 N Union Blvd, Colorado Springs, CO 80909

Writers’ Night is two full hours of discussion, laughter, and fun with other local members of Pikes Peak Writers.

The direction of the meeting is decided by the participants and can include discussions about query letters, obtaining and working with an agent, writing conferences, or other specific points of the craft.  If nothing else, we talk about books!

If you have any questions, or if there is a specific topic you’d like to get on the agenda, send an e-mail to the host, Deb Courtney, or call her on her cell phone at 719-337-9049.

Meetings are scheduled to start at 6:30 and run until about 8:30.  These are drop-in meetings, so feel free to attend all or just part of them.

Lessons learned from NaNoWriMo

By: Deb McLeod

Every year I orchestrate and deliver a two-week NaNo Prep Countdown designed to help writers who want to win get ready so they don’t face the blank page when they’re trying to reach their daily word count. And every year for the last six I’ve competed in NaNoWriMo myself, this year writing book two in my Twin Flames Romance Series with the working title Silver Love.

So I’ve spent the last two weeks playing with the plot. When I prep for a novel I have a certain process I follow and I like to immerse myself in the dream of the book before I write. This year I was ready to start writing at least a week ago, but I held off, trying to be true to the NaNoWriMo rules. I don’t always care about being a NaNo purist, but this year I decided to wait and keep working on the plot.

The result of waiting was that when I sat down at my desk today I wrote almost four scenes and 4550 words. And I could have kept going but the day’s obligations kicked in after I’d been writing straight for five hours. Oh, the bliss of getting lost in the story.

If you’ve never tried to build your understanding about your story before you actually start writing, I’d highly advise you to try. Here’s what some famous author/teachers have to say about the practice:

Robert Olen Butler wrote an entire book about it called From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction. He says artists access the way they see the world only by “going back to the way in which chaos is first encountered – that is, moment to moment through the senses. Then, [the writer] selecting from that sensual moment-to-moment experience, picking out bits and pieces of it, reshaping it, she recombines it into an object that a reader in turn encounters as if it were experience itself….”

He advises writers to get into the dreamspace of the unconscious to discover the yearning of the characters and the moment-to-moment sensual experience of the story. To dream the book alive.

Spending time in the dreamspace of the book is an excellent way to have it at your disposal when you start to write.

Madison Smartt Bell in Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form says that daydreaming is the writer’s vocation. That you create for yourself a sort of autohypnosis. “You put yourself apart from yourself, and you enter the imaginary world.”

He also says there’s an unconscious structure to the chaos that begins to morph when you allow yourself to ramble thought the bits and the parts of it.

The unconscious in action

Well, it’s day one of 2016 NaNoWriMo, and I can say for certain that both of those things happened to me this morning. I had been rambling around for two weeks, and when a piece of the structure suggested itself, I went with it and out poured 4550 words. I had spent enough time in the dreamscape of my novel that when it was time to write, I was already there.

So here’s my morning:

Four-thirty a.m. I’m at my desk. I hadn’t even made coffee yet. I read over my Scrivener scene card for the first scene. I have a scene card I use to prep the scene and really dive into when it’s time to revise. But the only part I’d filled out for all the scenes for NaNo was the synopsis: what happens during the scene.

I like doing the rest of the prep work right before I write the scene – figuring out the conflict and the arc. So I was reading over my notes and cycling through the various forms of conflict I could use for the first scene when a lightning bolt slammed home.

This is an historical romance set in Denver in the 1870s and I’m using the romantic trope of a mail-order bride to bring my hero and heroine together. The hero has won the bride in a poker game from her intended and I plotted it that they would get married fairly soon after they meet – as it’s only proper – and spend the book learning how to fall in love.

This is the way I plotted the entire first half of the book. Though I will admit I was having trouble plotting the second half, but that often happens to me. I sort of have to wait until I get there to know what the possibilities are.

When I was mulling the conflict of the first scene and thinking about the setting, my hero is waiting on the train platform for her train to arrive, my hero spoke up and said – I don’t want to get married.

And he’s right. He doesn’t. He’s not at all the marrying kind. That’s what was going to make scenes with his new wife so cute. But I realized she’s the one who wants to get married. Not him. In fact, she’s desperate to get under some man’s wing or she wouldn’t have answered the ad for a mail-order bride in the first place. And though she doesn’t know that her intended gambled her away, the hero is such a better catch than the guy who lost her in the poker game that she would marry him if only he’d ask.

So when she comes to Denver, she’s not only greeted by a different groom, she’s greeted by a man who will jilt her before they get in front of a preacher.

The energy from that new way of looking at the plot just drove the three-and-a-half scenes right onto the page.

I think I had prepped enough, put off starting to write long enough, and put myself in the miasma of the novel that it actually allowed me to think of the story differently. And when I did, I tapped into some kind of subconscious structure that wanted to exist.

Or is that too woo-woo for you?

Predreaming

If you’re competing in NaNoWriMo this year and you want a cutting edge, find a system of “predreaming,” as Butler calls it, before you write your scenes. Butler says:

“There is no intellect in this world powerful enough to create a great work of novelistic art. Only the unconscious can fit together the stuff of fiction; the conscious mind cannot.”

So tune out and tap into your world. Try what Butler calls “dreamstorming.” Dream around your novel and write down only eight to ten words that represent the potential scene you’re dreaming. Make sure it contains a sensual hook, a cue that will bring you back to this space once you start writing the scenes. “A little vision of something, a little smell or taste of something, a little sound… Don’t trust a scene that presents itself to you as an idea.”

Now if you’re competing in NaNo, you’re probably saying, where was this advice two weeks ago when I had time for dreamstorming? Well, don’t despair. You can do this too.

Take the time before you write to walk around the scene you have planned. Close your eyes and put yourself into sensual experience of it. Not just the five senses, feel where the characters are on the stage of the scene. Put yourself in your main character’s place and feel what he or she feels and why. Stay in that space just a little longer than you’re comfortable.

For me, when I’m ready to write a scene the first line pops in and off I go. Wait for that impulse and then start writing. Sort of a freewrite in scene form. Maybe, like me, the scenes will flow easier and be more vivid if you’ve predreamed the sensuality in the scene.

Work in weeks

For the first week, write act one scenes. For the second week, work on the scenes you would find in the first half of the second act. The third week, the second half of the second act. And week four has you writing the finale.

No worries that you’re skating over the novel and what you have needs revision. I’m a big revision teacher. That’s where the book solidifies. For now, and all through NaNo, get the gist of it and move on. Write the full scene if it comes do you. And if it doesn’t, write the senses, experiment with different conflicts scene by scene. Accumulate your words and go for a first draft that gives you something to work with.

Forget perfection and you can do it.

About the Author: Deb McLeod, MFA, practices novel research immersion. For her novel, The Train to Pescara, Deb journeyed to Sardinia to study ancient goddess worship and spent time in the Abruzzi village her great-grandparents left in 1905. Her metaphysical knowledge for the Angel Thriller, The Julia Set, culminates from four years of studying and teaching meditation, clairvoyance and chakra healing. For over fourteen years, Deb McLeod has been a creative writing coach helping other writers to embrace their passion and get their words on the page. For more, seewww.debmcleod.com.

Surviving the Road to Publication

Editor's Note: Pikes Peak Writers has two of the most knowledgeable marketing people serving as our publicity volunteers. We are honored to have them because they often make sense of social media where some of us can't. S.M. Rose is one of these experts. Here's his first blog on Writing From the Peak. 

By: S.M. Rose

With a series of thin plots and an extra helping of ad-lib comedy, Hope and Crosby paired up in their legendary “Road to” flicks, inevitably meeting up with the eye-catching Dorothy Lamour. Though predictable, these movies provided more than a decade of entertainment that is now entrenched in American film culture.

Prologue

More than four years ago, I began my own “Road to” journey. Unlike Bob and Bing, there was no partner in crime nor fetching femme fatale. These existed only in my manuscript. I felt the writing process was one best served alone, or at least only shared with those shadowy voices inside one’s head. I would close my man cave door, sit down, and start madly typing away. Or I would sneak some “me” time, daydreaming about the next scene or chapter, or maybe other books to be. Sound familiar?

Through this rite, I cobbled together more than 188,000 words in a little over nine months. In reading my family the manuscript, we all agreed the story should sell so I promptly went to find an agent.

Act I

Though green as moss, I was smart enough to check the Internet first. I knew I needed a synopsis and a query letter, and I attacked these challenges as I did my book. Alone.

From a local newspaper article, I found a list of literary agencies and subbed to each of them, one by one. The 2013 Canadian landscape was far different than its American counterpart. There were only about a dozen well-known agencies, and most wanted exclusivity when it came to their snail mail submissions. This made the process long, laborious, and frustrating. After a year, I exhausted that list without success.

Undaunted, I meandered outside my comfort zone and decided to submit to American agents, latching on to one in particular. She was totally into Science Fiction and Fantasy, and what I considered the perfect agent for my novel.

Unfortunately, she did not think so. I was devastated.

Act II

While submitting to this agent, I stepped further outside my comfort zone. I joined Twitter and began stalking her (in a good way, of course! :-), finding out what she liked and didn’t like when it came to representing an author. I later discovered this was a backwards approach, but that pearl of wisdom is for another blog.

That decision changed my writer’s life forever. I was no longer alone. I surveyed the digital landscape and found it filled with other writers going through similar experiences. I began with baby steps, connecting with a small group of writers and hiding behind an avatar of Superman—whose creator was my second cousin twice removed.

I fell down the rabbit hole of social media just as #SFFPit ended. In its aftermath, I found a tweet offering query critiques for $10 a pop. Well worth the investment. I respected the woman, and I learned a lot. She suggested I enter #PitchWars.

From there, I met hundreds of other writers. Looking at them as colleagues opposed to competitors, I gathered followers by the dozens, ending up on a communal critique board called GetOfMyLawnCon.

Here, I found the motherlode. Writers critiquing other writers. A concept I had heard of but never invested in. Another mistake. Venturing even further outside my comfort zone, I begin interacting with them directly. Being green at writing, this was a big step for me.

Another aftershock from #SFFPit was the formation of a critique group. Joining, I lucked out and was paired with a fantasy writer. Unfortunately for me, but fortunate for him, three weeks into our critiquing, his book was picked up by a publisher and he had to bow out.

My bubble burst.  Deciding this was a sign from the Writing Gods, I retreated back into my comfort zone. Alone.

Act III

Then something amazing happened. In revisiting GetOfMyLawnCon, I stumbled across two writers whom I had been tweeting with since #PitchWars. We clicked, instantly becoming the best of friends. In another bold move, I swapped manuscripts with the fantasy writer, then partnered with the paranormal romance writer. These experiences improved both my writing and critiquing skills.

From there, I left my comfort zone far behind, contributing more and more to the writers’ community each week. I began by tweeting learned advice, cheering on pitchfesters, to finally joining the Social Media team at PPW. So here I am, expounding upon my journey in a public blog. Something I would never have dreamed of doing a mere two years ago.

No, this is not an HEA story. My manuscript is still undergoing revisions, but it is far superior today than when I pitched it in #PitchWars of 2014. Dissecting and rewriting was difficult, but I now have help. My goal is to be query ready once more by Christmas.

Denouncement

• Writing is best accomplished alone, but transforming that first draft into a sellable book is not. Find one or more CPs whom you trust with your literary life. Their brutal honesty will be more than appreciated. And when you trip over those potholes along your own “Road to Publication,” they will be there to pick you up, dust you off, and make sure you continue on to that bestseller’s list.

•  Before you sub, research the agents. There are tools like QueryTracker and AgentQuery. I highly recommend checking out the Twitter hashtag #MSWL. Because, if you’re subbing to the wrong agent, you’re asking for a rejection.

• There are many online writers’ contests and pitchfests available. Contests help hone your craft, pitches help you find potential agents and publishers. Use both to your advantage.

• Check out your local writers’ convention. There are lots of workshops for the budgeted time. It’s also a great way to strengthen existing relationships and build new ones. I did both at PPWC2016.

• Above all, don’t become discouraged. There WILL be highs and lows along this road. Guaranteed. But you’re never alone.

• Nothing great happens to those who never leave their comfort zone. 

About the Author: SM Rose found his calling of writing late in life but attacks it with fervor. He continues to hone his craft on science-fiction and was a finalist in the 2015 Neoverse Short Story Competition. He is also a member of the Social Media team for Pikes Peak Writers. He day jobs as an IT manager at one of top five cancer research and treatment centres on the planet. When not writing or taming computers, he enjoys the arts of all forms, especially the movies. If you’re looking to engage, look no farther than @smr0se on Twitter or SM Rose on Facebook.

Quote of the Week and the Week to Come

“Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.”  ~ Alice Walker

 

Author Alice Walker, Source Wikipedia

Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and activist. She wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Oct 31     Surviving the Road to Publication by S.M. Rose

Nov 2       The Writing Coach Deb McLeod

Nov 4       Pikes Peak Writers November Events

Sweet Success Celebrates Shannon Lawrence & Shifting Sands

By Kathie Scrimgeour

PPW member Shannon Lawrence doesn’t seem to slow down! Another of her incredible short stories has found its way into the realms of publication. On July 15, 2016 her horror story, “Shifting Sands” was published in Dark Moon Digest by Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing (ISBN10: 1943720169, ISBN13: 978-1943720163, soft cover and ebook). Issue #24 is available on Amazon.

Issue #24 contains Horror Stories by Sarah Szabo, Gordon White, Jonathan Balog, Adrian Ludens, Shannon Lawrence, Matt Andrew, and Joshua D. Moyes

With Columns by George Lea and Jay Wilburn
And an excerpt from The Train Derails in Boston by Jessica McHugh!

A fan of all things fantastical and frightening, Shannon Lawrence writes primarily horror and fantasy. Her stories can be found in anthologies and magazines, including Under the Bed, Devolution Z, and The Deep Dark Woods. When she's not writing, she's hiking through the wilds of Colorado and photographing her magnificent surroundings, where, coincidentally, there's always a place to hide a body or birth a monster. Find her at www.thewarriormuse.com

Are you a Pikes Peak Writers member and have something to celebrate? Big or small, we want to hear from you. Contact Sweet Success Coordinator Kathie Scrimegeour at  ppwsweetsuccess@gmail.com

The Importance of a Bad Review

By: Karen Albright Lin

A bad review only has as much power as you give it. 

I’ve had my fair share of rejections, discouraging critique, and bad reviews. Each hurts like sliding down a razor blade. But I’ll tell you my own true story that may give you hope.

I submitted a personal essay to Red Line Magazine. (https://issuu.com/tobyvaughan/docs/issue_5/37?e=8987750/5479993)

It was about the Chinese preference for having male children. I’d written it as part of a series of humorous accounts from my marriage to a man from Taiwan. It was called “The Importance of a Penis.”

It received the worst review my work has ever gotten. For your entertainment, here is my dirty laundry:

“Given that this is a book club with members accustomed to Chinese Traditions and Writings, the story felt hackneyed to some, heartfelt to others. Unfortunately the writing was staccato in style, more akin to disjointed pieces of text stuck together than the expected flow of a well-constructed short story. While the vocabulary and grammar lacked precision (for example, many of our readers were turned off by the author’s use of the word ‘hubby’) some of the analogies and descriptive language seemed unique. Although the basic premise of the story would be considered solid if indeed it reflected a personal experience, the author should have paid more attention to its pace and flow. There was general agreement the story lacked maturity in style and flow.”

La Brea Tar Pits, LA Wiki Free Images

My first instinct was to find the nearest tar pit and drown myself. Then I reread the review and decided to preserve my ego by wallowing in the two phrases that seemed positive. After I fully recovered, I went about addressing the reviewers’ concerns. I also applied some of their recommendations to other essays in the series.

The result?

“The Importance of a Penis” went on to become a top 10 finalist in the Boulder Writers' Workshop Make Me Laugh Writing Contest and was read by TV comedy writer Gene Perret (Bob Hope’s writer). I was then invited to read the piece aloud before an open-to-the-pubic audience in Boulder.

I spiffed up the essay, expanded it, and gave it a new title, Dancing with John Wayne. That version received honorable mention in the Writer's Digest Writing Competition.

It became a chapter in a “novel of my life” and took 2nd place in the Paul Gillette Memorial Writing Contest (PPWC).  That novelized version, then entitled Culture Shock, made Quarter Finals in the  Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest.  It was given 5-star ratings by Vine Reviewers (top 1,000 Amazon reviewers).

( http://karenalbrightlin.com/ABNAMuShu.html )

I reworked it again into a chapter of a memoir, Mu Shu Mac-N-Cheese, which became a top 10 finalist (out of over 2,400 entries) in the HuffPost 50/AARP Memoir contest.  (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/22/memoir-contest-rules_n_4317794.html  )

An agent is currently waiting to read it after I add a subplot to the book.

To wrap up my story with irony, “The Importance of a Penis” was published by the magazine that gave me that worst review. It can be read in Red Line Magazine Power issue 5.

 ( http://issuu.com/tobyvaughan/docs/issue_5/37?e=8987750/5479993 )

Rejection is a writer’s workplace hazard. But there is a way to deal with that terrible review.

Make it work for you.

About the Author: Karen is an editor, ghostwriter, pitch coach, speaker and award-winning author of novels, cookbooks, and screenplays. She’s written over a dozen solo and collaborative scripts (with Janet Fogg, Christian Lyons and director Erich Toll); each has garnered international, national and regional recognition: Moondance Film Festival, BlueCat, All She Wrote, Lighthouse Writers, Boulder Asian Film Festival, SouthWest Writers Contest, and PPW Contest. Find out more at www.karenalbrightlin.com

A Farewell to My Characters

By: Natalia Brothers

My publisher just sent me a photo of my ARCs. I no longer must call what I have written “a story,” “a manuscript,” “a novel”—the words I used in my queries and pitches. Now I can call it a book. But there’s something else in the fusion of delight and excitement I bask in as I await an announcement of the release date. The sentiment is bitter-sweet, reminiscent to a stroll through a garden on a bright September day. Chrysanthemums are blooming, the dew sparkles on the grass plumes after the night’s storm, and every leaf and berry looks beautiful and vibrant; but the scent of autumn fills the air and you know the summer is over.

So, what causes all this brooding when I’m only weeks away from fulfilling my ambition and getting published?

It took many drafts before the manuscript turned into the story I envisioned, the tale I aspired to tell. The cast—the characters—resided in my head throughout the process, and I had grown accustomed to thinking of my fictional crew as if they were real people. Her face and smile, his voice and mannerism, the food they liked, the melodies they hummed…Their fears, joys, heartbreaks, victories…I knew more about them than I know about some of my friends.

Every detail popped into my mind whenever I sat down to write a scene. My characters accompanied me on long mountain hikes, my brainstorming time. The heroine awakened me at three in the morning:

“Hey, this is what I’d like to do. Is it very bad?”

Whoa. Would she dare?

She always did.

I was taught that since our characters exist entirely in our imagination, they possess no will of their own, their actions are fully under our control, and they will do whatever we picture them doing. It seems this conception is only partially true. Yes, I had the power to create these personalities. But once I had my cast, all I had to do was devote my creativity to conceiving the wickedest fight-or-flight, sink-or-swim, life-or-death scenarios. Day after day for several years, I let my characters wrangle with the pressures of the unfolding plot, while I chronicled their struggle.

Day after day. For several years.

Then, all of a sudden, it was over. The last line written, the last revision finished. The end.

How happy I was last summer when the contest edits called for changes in a couple of scenes. I could immerse myself in the plot again. Experience the characters’ emotional states. The situation. The setting.

Speaking of the setting…I’ll miss it too. A sequel will take place somewhere else, and it’s still in a world-building stage. The new locale is more of an impression, a fluid vision, a mirage in the process of shaping up into a major element of the story. The cast is a bunch of strangers I’m getting to know. The new heroine tries my patience. I gave the role to a secondary character from the original novel, thinking it would be easier if I at least knew someone in the new crew. But it didn’t help; it’s as if she’s not used to being the focus of my attention and refuses to be as proactive as her predecessor.

Of course, the logical explanation is that I, a hopeless pantser, shouldn’t have tried to plot that sequel. I don’t enjoy writing a story when I know what’s going to happen. I crave my characters’ spontaneous dialogues and actions. I want a heroine who won’t hesitate waking me up in the middle of the night.

So maybe I’ll tear up the sequel’s outline and start from the beginning.

About the Author:  Born in Moscow, Natalia grew up with the romance and magic of Russian fairy tales. She never imagined that one day she’d be swept off her feet by an American Marine. An engineer-physicist-chemist, Natalia realized that the powder metallurgy might not be her true calling when on a moonless summer night she was spooked by cries of a loon in a fog-wrapped meadow. What if, a writer’s unrelenting muse, took hold of her. Two of her passions define her being. Natalia is an orchid expert and she writes dark fantasy.

Quote of the Week and the Week to Come

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”  ~ Philip Pullman

Writer Philip Pullman, Source Wikipedia 

Philip Pullman CBE, FRSL is an English writer. He is the author of several best-selling books, most notably the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials and the fictionalized biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. 

This week on Writing from the Peak:

Oct 24       A Farewell to My Characters by Natalia Brothers


Oct 26       The Power of a Bad Review by Karen Albright Lin


Oct 28       Sweet Success Celebrates Shannon Lawrence

Sweet Success Celebrates Ann Myers, Barbara Nickless & Hooked on Books

Hooked on Books is a lovely new space in the heart of downtown Colorado Springs. Shelves of books, a beautiful view out the large front windows, and a helpful staff make it a great place to visit … and to hold a book signing.

Ann Perramond (writing as Ann Myers) and Barbara Nickless held a signing there on October 1^st. Ann was celebrating the one-year anniversary of the first book in her Santa Fe Café cozy mystery series, Bread of the Dead. The third book in the series, Feliz Navidead, comes out October 25^th.

Barbara Nickless launched her debut novel, Blood on the Tracks, the first in a mystery/thriller series about a railroad cop and her K9 partner.  (pictured here with Jim and Mary Ciletti, owners of Hooked on Books)

WHAT A FUN DAY!

Buzzwords! Resist the Urge to Explain

By: J.T. Evans

Lots of phrases, buzzwords, slang, jargon, and perfectly cromulent words are thrown about critique groups on a regular basis. Newcomers to critique groups can mentally stumble when they hear something along the lines of, "The POV in your WIP head hops through white room syndrome, and all of the narrative is written in passive voice with lots of tense shifts."

POV? WIP? White rooms? Is there padding on the walls of these white rooms? I feel like I'm going insane! I know I'm tense, but how is that shifting around?

Well, have no fear. I'm here to help expand your vocabulary into the writerly world of the critique group.

This month, I'm going to cover R.U.E., aka: Resist the Urge to Explain.

Resist the Urge to Explain: 

I'm horribly guilty of this. I've gotten better over the ten years (where has the time gone?!?) I've been part of critique groups, but I still open my mouth to explain some things when one of my critique partners doesn't get it. I usually catch myself and clack my jaw shut while scribbling my notes.  Here's the premise of why you should R.U.E.: Your words have to stand on their own because you will be entirely unable to stand over the shoulder of every reader of every book you sell and explain to them, "No. No. You didn't get it right there. That's not what I meant. The way you should interpret my words is…."

It's just not possible to do this. If your critique partners are struggling to understand something, then you need to clarify things using words on the page, not words passing your lips.

 

The only exception to R.U.E. is when a critique partner asks you a direct question of clarification that will assist them in framing the rest of their critique or feedback. There are times when it's valid to answer these questions, but also take the question as an opportunity to clarify your work.

Since I primarily write in the fantasy, urban fantasy, and science fiction genres, there can sometimes be lots to explain to the reader or critique partner. If I lay down some thick mythology or world building that doesn't make sense, then I need to readdress my approach at the descriptions. If I toss in some far-future tech into a story, it needs to be clear on how the tech affects the daily lives of the characters. If it's hard science fiction, then the deep dives into the sciences backing the futuristic predictions need to be understandable by the "common person" out there.

I don't write much romance, but I've read a bit of it inside and outside of critique groups. The things that need to be made clear to the readers are the emotional beats and reactions the characters are going through. If a particular character smiles when another one enters the room, we need to know why. Different readers will interpret the smiles in different ways, and losing that clarity of the emotional response is a good way to confuse or lose the reader down the road.

If you've heard a phrase or word in a critique group and you think others should know about it (or you're not sure what to think of it), drop me a comment below, and I'll add it to my list of Buzz Words to talk about.

J.T. Evans writes fantasy novels. He also dabbles with science fiction and horror short stories. He is the president of Pikes Peak Writers. When not writing, he secures computers at the Day Job, homebrews great beers, spends time with his family, and plays way too many card/board/role-playing games.