Critiquing Exercise

In my novel class this week, we did a fun exercise. Our instructor passed out photocopies of the first page for five or six different novels. He asked us to pretend that these writers had submitted this work for critique in our class. Would we keep reading? What advice would we have for revision?

So below are brief excerpts from page one of several different novels, one for adults (though teens would enjoy it) and the rest for teens or kids.

1. Would you keep reading?
   
2. What feedback would you give if the author were in your critique group?
3. Can you identify the author?
4. Can you identify the title?

Excerpt 1

She scowled at her glass of orange juice. To think that she had been delighted when she first arrived here--was it only three months ago?--with the prospect of fresh orange juice every day. But she had been eager to be delighted; this was to be her home, and she wanted badly to like it, to be grateful for it--to behave well, to make her brother proud of her and Sir Charles and Lady Amelia pleased with their generosity.

Excerpt 2

The wedding was held outdoors. An April sky darkened and gusts of wind, like large, unruly hounds, knocked over folding chairs and made off with hats and handkerchiefs. A bright yellow hat went sailing over the lake, cheered on by two small children.

Ada Story said to her husband, "I told Raymond this was not the season for an outdoor wedding."

Her husband, who was watching a black could race toward him as though it had singled him out and intended some mischief to his new summer suit, replied: "I don't know how you've lived this long and missed it, Ada. Our Raymond isn't interested in traveling the highway of our advice."

Excerpt 3

I am immune to emotion. I have been ever since I can remember. Which is helpful when people appeal to my sympathy. I don't seem to have any.

"Come on, John. It's not going to kill you to go to the auditions with me," Brian begged. "I hate doing stuff alone." He walked backward to the door of Darlington High's Little Theater, beckoning to me as though I were his golden retriever.

"Look," I told him, "I can't sing, I can't act, and I don't like musicals anyway. Especially this on. It's sappy." I didn't bother to remind him that I don't really go to this school. People think I do, but it's only my physical body, not me. Brian can't seem to understand that.

Excerpt 4

"Mother?"

There was no reply. She hadn't expected one. Her mother had been dead now for four days, and Kira could tell that the last of the spirit was drifting away.

"Mother." She said it again, quietly, to whatever was leaving. She thought that she could feel its leave-taking, the way one could feel a small whisper of breeze at night.

Now she was all alone. Kira felt the aloneness, the uncertainty, and a great sadness.

Excerpt 5

There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. There once was a very large lake here, the largest lake in Texas. That was over a hundred years ago. Now it is just a dry, flat wasteland.

There used to be a town of Green Lake as well. The town shriveled and dried up along with the lake, and the people who lived there.

During the summer the daytime temperature hovers around ninety-five degrees in the shade--if you can find any shade. There's not much shade in a big dry lake.

Excerpt 6

Later, I would think of it as crossing over. Maybe it was what my mother was doing, too. Crossing over. From a known territory into an unknown. From a place where people know you to a place where people only think they know you.

Like there's an actual river you swim across, an unpredictable, treacherous river, and if you make it to the farther shore, you're a different person than the one you were when you started out.

Novel Class, Week 10: Revision

How do you revise a long work? As you go? Do you wait until you're all done with a draft and then revise?

I revise minimally as I go, unless I have to turn something in for a class or a contest. I like to keep the momentum going, see what happens next, while writing the first draft.

I like to save revision, the really big picture stuff, for a completely finished draft. Then I give the draft some time and space before looking at it again. Then I can be more objective and ruthless.

Novel Class, Week 9: Dialogue

About 12 years ago I audited an undergraduate fiction writing course taught by Lee Hadley, half of the Hadley Irwin children's writing team. She taught dialogue by distributing transcripts of actual conversations and compared those to well written dialogue. It's a dramatic comparison. The pauses, the repetition, the sheer mundane nature of the content in the conversation are startling when revealed like that.

This week in class we talked about how conversation and fictional dialogue, especially as written for a novel versus for a play or screenplay, differ. All those pauses and repetitions we naturally include when we're speaking and thinking on our feet would be deadly dull, of course, in dialogue.

One thing I wonder is why some people have so much trouble with dialogue while others don't seem to struggle at all. Does it have anything to do with an "ear," kind of like having an ear for dialects?

We took turns reading short sections of dialogue in class. I think those readings showed some of the most dramatic differences from person to person. Granted, some people were probably reading rough draft, possibly first draft, material, and hearing it is different from reading it (I know I read too fast), but wow.

So in all fairness, I'm offering up the section I read from my in-progress YA novel. Jake is 15 and works in his grandparents' diner. It's a hot summer morning just a few days before school starts.

“So, Jake,” Mr. Sheldahl said, from the back of a booth filled with three other retired farmers, “are you going out for the football team this year?”

“No, sir, I’ll be running cross country again,” Jake said.

For crissake, Jake thought, why wouldn’t the geezer give it a rest. He’d been asking Jake the same question since seventh grade.

Man, he couldn’t wait until school started. At least he could get away from these same boring people who talked about the same boring things day after day.

Mr. Sheldahl shook his head. “Seems a pity to waste that speed out on some golf course race track ’stead of on the football field making touchdowns.”

“You don’t get hardly nobody to come watch your races, do you?” Mr. Albertson asked, squinting at Jake over his coffee.

“Not too many, no.”

A fact that didn’t bother Jake in the least. He didn’t really like people paying too much attention to him. Like right now, for instance.

“So how are you going to get a girl to notice you with you running away from her all the time?” Mr. Sheldahl asked. His friends snickered.

Jake felt his neck getting warm. He shrugged and smiled and turned away from the old farts.

“Good looking boy like you, I’m surprised the girls aren’t lined up out the door,” Mr. Albertson said.

Jake felt everyone looking at him. He set the coffee pots back on their burners.

“Well, sir, I guess the girls here don’t find me as attractive as you do.”

Mr. Sheldahl and his cronies hooted with laughter. Mr. Albertson chuckled and raised his mug to Jake.

What I read in February

It felt like I only read a couple of books in February. I didn't read much during the last half of the month because I was avoiding reading my book group book for March, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, but felt too guilty about not trying harder to read anything else. Probably I've been reading so many more straightforward narratives that the narrative style of The Known World was bound to annoy me. In the first 20 pages, which is all I could stand to read of it, the reader gets bounced into four or five different characters' heads.

Here's what I actually completed reading (or listened to on tape):

• A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park
• Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis
• The Game of Sunken Places by M.T. Anderson (author of Feed)
• Messenger by Lois Lowry
• How to Write a Damn Good Mystery by James Frey

I have to say I was disappointed by Messenger. It didn't seem as rich as either The Giver or A Gathering Blue. The resolution also seemed forced.

I really liked the premise of The Game of Sunken Places. Two boys get drawn into a real-life game that will determine the fate of a whole people. But I felt sort of yanked around, dragged from place to place to place. And why is the brainy kid always the less athletic one who wears glasses?

A Single Shard was masterful.

Novel Class, Week 8: Our Concerns

To prepare for this class, Neal asked us to bring our concerns about our novel for a sort of group therapy discussion. I was a little leery of that concept. Sounded a bit too personal.

Nevertheless I made a list of my concerns:

• that I've chosen the wrong point of view, that using first person for the main character and close third for a secondary character intermittently is going to annoy people, particularly editors and agents
• that I don't know where I'm going exactly
• that I don't know enough about my secondary characters, especially the suspects and the murderer
• that I'm taking too long to get to the murder
• that I'm not getting any new work done on it and we're half way through the semester

One of the other YA writers was eager to get the discussion going. Her main concern was finding/making time to write. Like many full-time grad students, procrastination is her middle name. She said she schedules her homework and that's working pretty well. Neal offered to give her deadlines and tie her grade to how well she sticks to them.

The look on her face said that was not a good option. Getting up at 5 am, as one of our classmates does, was also not realistic.

I suggested she schedule her writing time too, but do it before her homework, say for 20 minutes. Kind of like paying yourself first when you pay your bills each month. She seemed to like that idea.

We also discussed what we'll turn in at the end of the semester. At last! The syllabus was absolutely bare bones. No assignments were listed at all--just topics for discussion.

Neal first tossed out the idea of 100 pages. I think he was testing the waters with that cast because one person said that would have been okay at the beginning of the semester, but not now, not with six or seven weeks to go until the end and other papers due for other courses. So he suggested the first 50 pages instead.

Hallelujah! I have a goal. In rough draft form, I already have about 35 pages, so I'm well on my way.

Novel Class, Week 7: Plot

I struggled with this week's assignment--a plot outline or stepsheet (to use James Frey's term, author of How to Write a Damn Good Novel). Neal said it could be as loose or detailed as we wanted. The more I thought about it during the week before class, the less sure I was of anything related to my novel.

As is my custom, however, I turned to a book for help. James Frey has a new book out called How to Write a Damn Good Mystery. I saw it on the new book shelf at the Ames Public Library and picked it up.

Frey claims that virtually all mysteries follow a basic five-act structure:

1. How the detective accepts the mission to find the murderer
2. How the detective is tested and changed, and, in the pivotal scene, dies and is reborn
3. How the detective is tested again and finally succeeds
4. How the detective traps the murderer
5. How the events of the story impact the major characters

I like having a basic structure to work from, kind of like the hero's journey as described by Joseph Campbell. This makes sense to me, so I'm going to use it.

Another useful idea I picked up from Frey was creating a stepsheet of off-stage scenes/actions as well as the ones the reader will actually see. That way I can keep track of what all my suspects are up to.

Which brings me back to where I got stuck. I discovered that I don't know enough yet about my suspects and other minor characters to develop the story much further. So back to character building I go.