My Novel's Journey: Discovery: When a Crit Makes You Cry

You all know the struggle I've gone through with Discovery. (If not, here's the gist: five years, four false starts, two episodes of computer eating the manuscript, three weeks of obsessive effort and 108,000 finished words.)

Now, it's with my beta readers: people whose writing I admire and who know me well enough not to pull any punches when they crit my work. They know that, despite all my word count brags and phony whining about this or that writing complication, when it comes to a critique, I don't care so much about what I've done as how do I make it even better.

I feel the same about Discovery--maybe even more so. The story started out so simple--in my discouraged moments, I called it "Love Boat in Space"--but it wanted, it demanded, to be so much more. And (aside from the computer crashes), that's part of what took such effort. I did not feel up to the task--as a writer, as a thinker, or as a Catholic. Most of you have seen my stuff; "heavy" and "deep" are not the usual modifiers.

So, I have to admit, that while I was pleased with the manuscript, I was also a little worried that I'd still missed my mark. Frankly, that would have been okay, because I have some excellent writer friends critiquing it, and I trust them to show me where I fell short.

I'm writing this on July 9. (I plan my posts.) An hour ago, I got my first critique for Fred Warren, a Christian writer who writes stories in my Rescue Sisters universe. The first three words made me cry:

Wow. Just...wow.

Those three words told me, that despite the problems with the storyline--and he pointed out some good ones!--I succeeded in my primary goal: The Story Works!

My Novel's Journey: Mind Over Matter edits

I love my Critique buddies!

I got back a few comments on Mind Over Mind last week--not a lot, but very helpful.

Everyone agreed the first chapter was too confusing--the POV was from a minor character so it set up the wrong expectation, the transition to the second chapter was jarring, and no one really understood the information I was trying to get across. After re-writing the entire chapter twice, I decided it was simply not going to work. Instead, I split what I needed into a different chapter and a scene, told it from a major character's POV and wove them in later. Then I had to make sure the rest of the manuscript matched up, but it's a lot better.

One critiquer didn't like the final conflict, and I realized I needed to do more foreshadowing. That wasn't too hard. She also thought it was too long, but going over it, I didn't agree and didn't know where to cut, so I am leaving it for the second-round critiquers.

I have done the read-aloud test, this time alone for time sake and because some of the topic is not really suited for a 10-year-old boy, but I really enjoyed it. Next job, the backward-by-sentence check for grammar, wording and typos.

My Novel's Journey: Mind Over Matter--what I hope to get from my critiquers

Mind Over Matter is off to my crit crew, which is usually a few trusted readers who are also good writers, plus a couple of folks who volunteer.

There's a difference between a critique and an edit that a lot of folks don't get. Edits are very specific and are usually corrections rather than suggestions. Naturally, finding typos constitutes and edit. Going through a manuscript and picking out all the passive voice, is IMHO, an edit. Edits also are focused on what is wrong in a story.

Critiques are more general and broader reaching--comments on voice, point of view, plot progression and the like. Sometimes, these combine with edits, like if a critiquer points out an instance of head-hopping. (That's changing the point of view from one character to another in the middle of a paragraph or scene.) Critiques also focus on what's right. So a critique might sound like
"I didn't believe Joshua's motivation when he..."
"You mentioned this fact four times. We get it already!"
"This is an intense scene!"
"I love how you..."
"You do really well when you ____ in this scene; I'd like to see you do more of that in _____chapter."
"This flashback threw me out of the story; could you rewrite it in realtime and put it earlier?"

I'm not looking for a line-by-line, because I'm not ready for that, and I also do pretty well with that on my own. However, I'm hoping I can get some good feedback on the book as a whole.