Vonnegut’s legacy

Like many people, I guess, I’ve felt a special attachment to Kurt Vonnegut since the first time I read anything by him. That first book was probably Slaughterhouse 5, and I read it because they made a film in the early seventies that looked interesting and vaguely science-fiction-ish. Which was a plus.

So that was about 1972, and over here in Britain they started publishing or republishing all of his early works. So I was able to scarf up The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle, Mother Night, Player Piano … all leading to the publication of his ‘birthday present to [him]self’ – Breakfast of Champions, in 1973.

So what was it that attracted people to him? What did he do, as a writer, that made the books resonate?

Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan are, to some extent, fairly straightforward science-fiction. Except that the latter is very funny, cleverly structured, and speaks with an individual voice practically unheard in 1950s science-fiction. By that I mean that you have a sense of a real person writing the words. It’s there in the first few paragraphs, and if you look closely you can see how he does it: simple phrases, homely words, familiar metaphors. Like this:

“Gimcrack religions were big business.” …
“Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward … It flung them like stones.”

The use of “gimcrack”, “big business” and “like stones” tell us that this language is going to be the kind of language we all use. It’s not “literary” or difficult. It’s slightly ironic in tone but the irony of the common person, the person who regards large institutions with suspicion and who uses language to describe exactly what he or she sees, without fancy metaphors: “like stones.”

Reading The Sirens of Titan now, it actually feels quite literary compared to the later books. There are long sentences, quite a few descriptive passages, and lots of characters and situations. Later, Vonnegut refined his technique further – fewer characters, shorter sentences, less description. It was as if we began to understand Vonnegut-world and he didn’t have to describe it to us any more. What became important was the depth of his insights and the simplicity with which he began to express them.

At one level, this is perhaps why his novels became less successful even as his essays and other writings became more popular. He no longer needed the excuse of fiction to talk to us – he could use his essays and recorded speeches. I was sorry about that, because reading The Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse 5 and Cat’s Cradle for the first time is a lesson in how to have your head expanded to take in new fictional possibilites. For example, the use of drawings – created by himself – to punctuate and illustrate his books; or the introduction of himself as a character in Breakfast of Champions, pre-dating similar tactics by Martin Amis, Philip Roth and Douglas Coupland by a few decades. (He actually introduced himself as a character, though briefly, in Slaughterhouse 5, as someone excreting his brains … always the comedian!)

I spent a couple of years studying Vonnegut for a Ph.D. thesis, and later went on to teach Cat’s Cradle to college students. Despite these circumstances that are guaranteed to cool your ardour for any author, I ended up admiring him even more as a writer. To the extent that I found my own writing was beginning to lurch towards sub-Vonnegutian aphorisms and brevity. Unfortunately for me – or perhaps fortunately – I hadn’t suffered the same way he had: his mother committed suicide on the eve of Mother’s Day, the day Vonnegut returned home prior to being shipped abroad to fight in WW2; and his sister, Alice, and her husband, both died in one week in 1958 – she of cancer, he in a railroad accident two days before. All of these events, together with the well-publicised circumstances he endured during the fire-bombing of Dresden, gave him a perspective on the brevity of human life that was hard earned.

So Kurt has been there somewhere in the background for me for the last 35 years or so. Even as I read his later works with less and less enthusiasm, my admiration for the man as a humanist and someone who saw things clearly grew. Now it seems like there isn’t anyone out there who’s going to call us to account. My other favourite living author, Gore Vidal, is declining as a literary force, and his playful, if biting, comments more often sound left-field rather than right-minded. Too many disappointments seem to have clouded his judgement.

In these days of Bush, Blair and Bin Laden, we needed Kurt Vonnegut. Shame he had to go.

RIP

Your instrument …

At the same time as I’m working on my second novel, I’m also learning to play the guitar. I started about a year ago and progress is slow, largely because I’m teaching myself in a very haphazard fashion.

It struck me the other day that one of the reasons it’s hard to learn an instrument (at least a stringed instrument) is because there are several things you have to learn at the same time.

First, you have to train your body to complete manoeuvres it has no intention of completing of its own accord: fingers need to stretch to reach a span of notes on a fretboard; arms need to bend over the guitar body and under the frets, leaving you with aching shoulders; your back needs to be held upright even as you’re sitting on the edge of a chair.

Secondly, you have to do different things with your hands at the same time – fret chords with the left, pluck or strum strings with the right.

Thirdly, you may have to learn to read music – or at least the tablature that guitarists mostly read.

Fourth, there’s pain! Your fingers have to build calluses, and this can take months. Until they’re hard, your finger tips are grooved with painful lines, meaning you can only play for minutes at a time before having to shake your hand and utter a few choice words.

Fifth, if you play an electric guitar (which I don’t), you have to build a body of knowledge about electronics and amplification.

Why am I listing all these? Well, using one of those far-fetched analogies of which preachers are fond, it suddenly seemed to me that learning to play the guitar is a little like writing a book …

First, you have to train your mind to complete manoevres it has no intention of completing of its own accord: for example, you probably have to be more organised than might be usual for you – for instance, keeping track of the colour of characters’ eyes, or the timeline of events in your book, or the past history of your heroine. You also have to have the discipline to write, sitting at that table for hours every day, developing carpal tunnel syndrome, short-sight and (if you’re unfortunate) haemarrhoids.

Secondly, you have to do different things with the right and left parts of your brain – the creative and the structured. You have to follow a plan, an outline, a rough mental sketch – whatever system you’ve found suits you – but at the same time be open to the unexpected flash of intuition that takes you along a completely different path. Many writers seem to have nailed one but have trouble with the other!

Thirdly, you may have to learn grammar and spelling. Don’t be fooled that these will be fixed by an editor. Your work won’t even reach an editor if these two systems of notation aren’t reasonably well mastered.

Fourth, there’s pain! Mental anguish as you begin to believe you can’t do it, the words won’t come, the characters aren’t really alive, the plot is dull … why did you bother starting in the first place? You just have to build the mental calluses, the tough-mindedness that says, Write it, then Re-write it. You can’t do the second without the first, so just get it down on paper.

Fifth, if you use a computer (which I do!), you have to build a body of knowledge about word processing, filing, back-ups, formatting and printing.

Maybe these elements just happen to be part of the act of creation. Maybe for anything good to be formed out of thin air, you need to have developed mental and physical toughness, creativity and organisation. Maybe to use your instrument to the best of its abilities, you have to suffer pain, too. What a comforting thought!

Keith
Author of Altered Life

On or off the bus?

In the early 60s, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters toured America in an old bus, promoting the use of LSD as a way of revolutionising society. People who thought of themselves as ‘Pranksters’ were considered to be ‘on the bus’; if not, you were ‘off the bus’.

I feel somewhat the same about Print on Demand publishing. I have a novel that I’ve self-published, Altered Life, and I’m proud that it’s out there and being bought, gradually, by people I don’t know.

By the same token, I know that I’m off the bus – I haven’t gone through a process of being chosen by an agent, sold to a publishing house, edited by a professional editor, proof-read by a person wearing thick glasses … I’ve done all these things myself. So part of me feels slightly like a second-class citizen, faking it, pretending to be an author when I’m actually someone with a lot of persistence and chutzpah.

Yet out there in POD-land, I come across many folk who consider themselves writers because they’ve put themselves in print, and people are buying their books. And I can’t decide what I think about this – and about their claims (and my claims) to be published authors. They show diligence, self-belief, marketing awareness and the ability to project manage. Some of them can even write a bit. But if you’ve not gone through the commercial publishing process, are you really a writer – or just a self-publicist?

For example, I have an acquaintance who has published a book through a large and well-known publishing house. I’ve read the opening pages … and that’s as much as I’d care to read. The reviews on Amazon.com have been mixed – some poor, some good. Yet the book is still 270000th on the hardback sales list (compared to my humble 1.4 millionth in paperback), which will be almost entirely down to the marketing clout of the publisher and the fact that the book is on bookstores’ shelves. It’s not, I believe, down to quality.

So are we PODders deluding ourselves? Just because a book is nicely printed by our publishers, doesn’t mean it would cut it in the commercial world. Are those of us who call ourselves writers just people who can string a sentence together but don’t have anything to say that would interest a commercial editor or publisher? I guess it comes down to what criteria you’re using – commercial acceptance or personal achievement. I suppose I view ‘writers’ as those who’ve managed the first of these. To publish by POD is certainly the second, and not to be sneezed at. But is it enough? I’m not sure.

I want to be on the bus, but I have a feeling I’m actually off it.

Making our people real

What makes you believe that the character you’re reading about is a real person? And what makes you want to find out more about them?

For me, these are two crucial factors for a fiction writer to consider. If you don’t believe in the character, you won’t be interested in what they’re doing or care what happens to them. And if you don’t want to find out more about them, then the story will have no real ‘guts’.

So how do you establish a level of characterisation?

There are two main tactics that writers can employ: speech and action.

When our characters speak in inverted commas, we hear them directly. There is no mediation by the author, no commentary by someone telling us what to think – we simply ‘hear’ the person speaking. So to make our characters real, they must use the language we expect them to use. Crooks don’t, on the whole, talk like college professors, and vice versa. Consequently we have a number of tools we can use:

– diction: the choice of words
– pace: the length of sentence together with punctuation
– structure: how the words are put together

Diction

“‘Man, I don’ lend my sled to nobody!’
‘Then who’d you lend your 12-gauge pump shotguns to? Boy, you spill on that.’
‘Man, I tol’ you I don’t own no shotgun!’
Jack stepped in. ‘Tell me about the Purple pagans. Are they a bunch of guys who like purple cars?’”

(James Ellroy, LA Confidential)

Here, the contrast between Jack’s slang-free speech and that of Leonard and Denton, crook and cop, sets him apart and is a ‘voice of reason’ whom the reader can identify with. Whenever he speaks, we listen and know that he’s using logic and rationality to gather evidence and filter information. He’s characterised as the good guy.

Pace

“‘Well, that’s a barn all right, and a beautifully drawn barn. I very much like the pattern of light and dark. You’re very talented, Sanford.’
‘And that’s a tobacco plant growing. That’s what they look like. See, it’s shaped like a triangle. They’re big. That one’s still got the blossom on top. It’s before they top it.’”

(Philip Roth, The Plot Against America)

Here the Rabbi’s more languorous sentences are compared to the young Sandy’s, which are choppy, eager, each sentence replicating a thought as it occurs to the young mind. The immaturity of his teenage mind is captured in sentences which also are immature, not shaped in the same way as the rabbi’s are. Notice also the rabbi’s more mature diction – ‘I very much like’.

Structure

“‘What do you think?’ he demanded imperiously.
‘About what?’
He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.
‘About that. As a matter of fact, you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.’
…
‘Who brought you?’ he demanded. ‘Or did you just come? I was brought. Most people were brought.’

(F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)

In this extract we see the man characterised by his repetition of phrases. Fitzgerald has structured his speech to show how the man’s mind works. He makes an observation, then uses the same word to enlarge on the observation – ascertain, ascertained; brought, brought. This slight structuring of his dialogue is enough to fix him in our minds as someone probably small-minded or precise and probably a little smug.

The second tool we writers have at our disposal, apart from speech, is action.

We get involved with the lives of a character when they do something out of the ordinary – whether it’s risky in a physical or psychological sense, or simply unusual in that we couldn’t see ourselves behaving in the same way. When that happens, we try to attribute a motive to their actions because it’s a human trait to want to understand why other people behave the way they do.

Why does Gatsby say he was driving the car that killed Myrtle Wilson instead of Daisy? Why does Yossarian act the way he does when asked to fly more missions? Why does Holden Caulfield abscond from school to visit his sister Phoebe? All of these are actions that help characterise the hero as ‘different’. And in the same way that we’re attracted to the ‘bad’ boys and girls at school, this refusal by our characters to follow a traditional, safe pattern of behaviour is what draws readers to them.

So characterising our heroes and heroines, and the lesser personae, isn’t just a case of making them look different physically (a common trait of beginning writers). It’s also a case of putting them in situations where they can make strong decisions that we don’t expect or even understand. And making them speak in ways that differentiate them from each other using different vocabularies, length of sentences and structured phrases. Then the reader begins to really see how they are different from each other – and interesting enough to want to read more about.

Keith

‘Tis a gift to be simple

I’ve been reading Kurt Vonnegut’s latest work, a man without a country, and as always with this great writer I’ve been struck by how simply he writes.

I’m sure a lot of writers get into putting words on paper because they actually like words – their complexities, their implications, their undercurrents. But with Vonnegut it’s almost as though he’s gone past that. He now recognises that it’s more important to be read widely and understood than to ‘dazzle’ with erudition and the use of words of more than two syllables. So he uses the most simple of sentence construction and the simplest of words.

And you know what? His writing has enormous power, dignity and truth because of it. Here’s the briefest of samples:

“Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.”

The simplicity lies in the straightforward sentence construction, without any sub-clauses. It lies in the use of active verbs and simple vocabulary. And it lies in the rhythms he establishes by using the word ‘dream’ in each of the three sentences, and by the repetition of the phrase “when there were no/was no”. The most complex word is ‘generation’, which has four syllables, but is a simple word to understand nonetheless.

Reading Vonnegut, to me, is a continual masterclass in how to communicate through writing. It’s as though he learned the lessons that George Orwell tried to teach in “Politics and the English Language” and took them one step further.

This simplicity, and power, is something we could all do well to aspire towards. That is, if we want our writing to mean something.

Dialogue that hums

I like good dialogue in a book.

It brings the characters alive, moves the story on, adds depth to the milieu in which the characters move. And to me, good dialogue always involves conflict. Take this example, from James Lee Burke’s Sunset Limited. Our hero, Dave Robicheaux, is a cop in Louisiana, and he’s about to take delivery of a suspect. This portion of dialogue could have been omitted or it could have been a straightforward exchange where Dave takes the suspect from the deputy and says thanks. Instead, Burke uses it to characterise Dave, the deputy, and the deputy’s attitude towards Dave:

A uniformed deputy picked up Cool Breeze in front of a pawnshop on the south side of New Iberia and brought him into my office.
‘Why the cuffs?’ I said.
‘Ask him what he called me when I told him to get in the cruiser,’ the deputy replied.
‘Take them off, please.’
‘By all means. Glad to be of service. You want anything else?’ the deputy said, and turned a tiny key in the lock on the cuffs.
‘Thanks for bringing him in.’
‘Oh, yeah, anytime. I always had aspirations to be a bus driver,’ he said, and went out the door, his eyes flat.

Notice how when Dave asks the question, ‘Why the cuffs?’, Burke doesn’t have the deputy answer it – instead, he says what’s on his mind. This adds more conflict immediately and the passage begins to hum with concealed tension. Compare it with this section from Patricia Cornwell’s Unnatural Exposure, where the tension is given to us overtly. Our heroine, Kay Scarpetta, is talking to her police contact, Marino:

‘I can’t believe this.’ I was only getting angrier. ‘I have to release information to correct misinformation. I can’t be put in this position, Marino.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m going to take care of this and a whole lot more,’ he promised. ‘I don’t guess you know.’
‘Know what?’
‘Rumor has it that Ring’s been seeing Patty Denver.’
‘I thought she was married,’ I said as I envisioned her from a few moments earlier.
‘She is,’ he said.

This is a simple exchange of information. Scarpetta does her usual thing of getting angry at the flimsiest excuse (this is how Cornwell characterises her, in general), and then we learn about ‘Ring’ and ‘Patty Denver’ in a very mundane dialogue predicated on the fact that Marino knows something and Scarpetta doesn’t:

‘I guess you don’t know.’
‘Know what?’

… or that Marino is confirming something that she’s unsure of:

‘I thought she was married’ [ ... ]
‘She is.’

It’s much easier to write dialogue like this, persuading yourself that you’re filling the reader in on useful information – and to be fair, a crime or mystery novel sometimes has to do this to fill in back story. But it’s not dramatic, it’s not much fun to read, and it leaves your characters speaking like robots. Just look at The Da Vinci Code to see what I mean.

So what can we learn? The lessons seem to be:

1. Resist the temptation to create ‘Call and Response’ dialogue: ‘Who’s that?’ ‘It’s me.’ It might seem to flow, but it’s dull.
2. Similarly, if you have a character ask a question, don’t let your next speaker answer it directly.
3. To prevent your dialogue being functional, add in a phrase or sentence that helps characterise your speaker – like ‘I always had aspirations to be a bus driver’ above.
4. Edit and keep the sentence-length short. Like this.
5. Never have someone tell someone else something they already know, just to fill in the reader.

Oh, and in the words of George Orwell, break these rules rather than say anything outright barbarous!

Keith

The Future of Publishing

Wow, big topic title.

I’ve been moved to think about this because of the development of a new machine that takes Print on Demand to just about its limit. It’s called the Espresso, and it can print and bind a single copy of a book in 8 minutes. And it can hold 2.5 million books in its memory.

For an article and a video demonstrating the monster, go to this link. Once the video has started, fast forward about 25 minutes to see the thing working:

Espresso

I understand the machine is being set up in libraries in the US so that people can, presumably, buy books there as well as borrow them.

I don’t know how I feel about this. I think publishing is a noble and ancient profession, which incorporates a lot of checks and balances so that, generally speaking, bad writing is filtered out. If it becomes possible to take your pdf file down to the library and cheaply print out 50 copies of your masterpiece and sell them from a back of a truck, is that necessarily a good thing? Your unedited, ungrammatical, unstructured scribblings? Before we know it, the world could be flooded with so much writing no one would ever read again. Rather like TV today – there’s so much around, it’s hard to find the good stuff. 57 channels and nothing on, as the Boss said.

On the other hand, I completely understand this is an elitist and probably undemocratic stance to take. Why shouldn’t anyone be able to publish their writing? If Jo Schmo wants to see his cherished detective novel between covers, why shouldn’t he able to do it at little or no cost? (That, by the way, describes me and my effort on Lulu.com.) Of course, it has been possible to vanity publish for a long time – but at a greater cost, and only by printing in numbers that make it viable for the printers.

I guess I’m uneasy because I’ve seen a lot of writing on a lot of sites that is just plain bad and not likely to earn an audience. If you’ve persuaded a publisher to publish your work, you’ve done something that has gone through a quality control process of some kind, and your readers are guaranteed some level of literacy, design … hell, professionalism. Lots of self-publishers think these things are just obstacles put in the way of writers to prevent them expressing their God-given talent. They’re not. They’re what a paying customer has a right to expect in exchange for their hard-earned currency.

Print on Demand is a fantastic tool to help writers get involved in the publishing process. For me, it should complement, not replace, the traditional, commercial route to print. However, I fear that the future of publishing might be a clever machine that sits under your desk and prints out perfectly bound copies that have been seen by no other human eyes than your own. And even as a self-publishing author, that worries me.

Writing books

… Clever wordsmithing, eh?

Because I want to start a series not about writing books, but about books on writing – books aimed at people who are trying to write, learning the trade, coming to grips with the long hours and the self-imposed angst, the hurried meals and the indigestion …

Anyway, I have a shelf-full of books on writing and there’s no doubt that some have been more useful than others.

On the whole, they fall into two categories – books by people you’ve heard of, and books by people that generally speaking, and being kind … you haven’t. This latter group might include ‘academics’ – folk who teach creative writing – or they might be established writers who you just haven’t come across.

So in my first category I have:

Writing the Novel, by well known crime writer Lawrence Block
Write Away, by English crime novelist Elizabeth George
Writing the Popular Novel, by American crime writer Loren Estleman
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, by the doyenne of crime writing, Patricia Highsmith

… I think you can see a pattern emerging. Yup, I read a lot about how to write crime fiction. The writers I mention here tend to provide what I would call a more ‘generalised’ approach. That is, they will talk in general terms about how they put together their plots, and write almost exclusively from their own experience, rather than referring to other writers. They’re talking about what works for them. That was obviously the commission from the publishers and they’re going to stick to it. These books are useful if you want to know more about a particular writer’s style or how they achieve their effects.

The books in my second category – by writers you may not have heard of – tend to be more specific, and will refer to a broader base of writing, using examples from work other than their own. Many of these books happen to be published by Writers Digest Books, which I think is a great imprint and provides works that are very specific and helpful. For example, on the bookshelf we have:

How Fiction Works, by Oakley Hall
Plot and Structure, by James Scott Bell
Dynamic Characters, by Diane Kress

As you see, these books will often focus on a particular element of writing – plot, character – and offer some straightforward guidelines or advice to help you make these elements work for you. If you feel you need to focus on a particular aspect of writing, then these are the kind of books to get hold of.

I’ll conclude with who I think has been the most helpful writer to me. There are two books by Sol Stein, who has been a writer, an agent and a publisher, and so knows the writing world from the inside out.

In the UK, he had two books on writing published:

Solutions for Writers
Solutions for Novelists

I’m pretty sure they’ve been published under different titles in the USA. What I like about his books is that he’s very specific. He talks at length about the process of writing word by word, about line editing, about what he calls ‘triage’ – part of the process of re-writing. He helps you see how the order in which words appear in a sentence can help or hinder the reader’s understanding. All of this is very comforting to a writer who likes words and language and fears for literacy in the age of the Net … (says he, writing his blog!)

I have more books that I’ll talk about in the future, but I’d be interested to hear of any others that folk have found particularly useful. After all, in the age of the Net I can order them to be delivered right to my doorstep!

Keith

Controversial rules

I’ve started a heated debate on one of the Lulu forums by posting Elmore Leonard’s ‘10 rules of writing’.

I posted them in fun and as a way of getting some debate going, and you would think I’d just nailed a new version of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses on to the church door in Wittenberg. Oh, the controversy!

For reference, here are the ‘Rules’:

1. Never open a book with a description of the weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”.
5. Keep your exclamation marks under control.
6. Never use the word “suddenly”.
7. Only use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Ditto, places and things.
10. Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.

Now to me, these are eminently sensible things to bear in mind when writing, and I’m sure they describe Leonard’s own approach to his work.

But to the ‘creative’ mind it would seem as though I’ve just tried to imprison writers by making it impossible to write anything, should they follow these rules. What nonsense!

The rule that has upset people most has been the one about only using ’said’. It’s as if the writing community out there is holding on dearly to its use of ‘he whispered’, ’she muttered’, ‘he moaned’, ’she wailed’ … ad infinitum. It’s been pointed out that only using ’said’ is boring – but to me that’s masking the point. The point is that ’said’ is so inoffensive, it sinks into the background. In the end you don’t ‘read’ it at all, so your focus is more on the dialogue than the surrounding, qualifying verbiage. That’s one of the reasons I can’t read JK Rowling – she’s always telling you what to think about the characters through her use of qualifiers and characterising adjectives/adverbs. And it’s condescending to the reader AND the characters.

It’s also been pointed out to me that writing is a ‘creative’ art and so rules are surely anathema to it. Again, what nonsense! Writing these days is, unfortunately, a business and an industry. And if you want to get published, there are some rules you need to understand. I’m not saying Leonard’s rules are the be-all and end-all, but they’re a good start. And they’re not as bad as some I’ve read. For instance, in John Braine’s book about Writing a Novel, he begins by saying that after you’ve thought up your plot, you should divide it into 20 chapters … now if that isn’t prescriptive, I don’t know what is.

For me, Leonard’s rules are pretty good guidelines for writing commercial fiction. I understand that not all fiction fits into that bracket – the literary novel is the case in point – but if you want to get published professionally in the first instance, it surely doesn’t do any harm to show that you ‘get it’? That you can write professionally to begin with – and then, later, you can break whatever rules you damn well like.

Getting the word across

I’ve been trying out a couple of sites where you can get your work critiqued by folk who don’t know you – thus getting around that difficulty of asking friends or family to give an ‘honest’ opinion. Yeah, right, as if that’s going to happen!

They don’t want to hurt your feelings OR they don’t actually read much OR they do read but they know nothing about the genre in which you’re working. So their views don’t add up to a hill of beans. Sorry, folks, that’s just the way it is.

So online communities where you can get some kind of feedback from people who don’t know you, but are interested in writing, and may even know something about the genre you’re writing in … it’s what the internet was created for!

I mentioned Critique Circle in my first entry on this blog. Here you have to critique 3 other pieces of writing before you get the opportunity to upload your own. It goes in a ‘Newbie’ queue initially, then when that piece has had six reviews you can start posting your work to a forum that’s more specialised. So my new book, The Secret Place, is going up now on to the Mystery – Crime – Suspense forum. Pieces stay a week in the visible part of the forum before being archived. I’ve had 12 crits on one chapter – some of them helpful, some of them disposable, not because they were ‘negative’ in tone, but because the comments were opinionated and not detailed enough. Here’s the home page:

Critique Circle

The other site is I think a UK site, because it’s backed by the Arts Council of Great Britain. The way this one seems to work is that you review someone’s opening chapters, which then gives you the right to upload your own. If it’s a chapter from a novel, then it must be between 6K and 10K words. If it’s a short story, it can be less. You get feedback in the form of a straightforward review, but the reviewer also rates the story 1 – 5 on a number of factors such as believable characters, dialogue, plot development etc. Then, each month, the highest rated chapters get a free critique from ‘literary professionals’, including agents and a published author. There are a few more hoops to jump through for this site, but as with Critique Circle it’s free and works well, so it’s worth giving it a go. The site is here:

YouWriteOn

I’m sure there are similar sites elsewhere but if I carried on looking for them, I’d never get anything else written, would I? Oh, I was forgetting, that’s the premise of the Idle Writer …