Giving Feedback

Giving feedback.  Image © Lori Gravley

I’m in a couple of wonderful picture book critique groups, and I’ve been critiquing for nearly 25 years.  I have a set of rules in my head, and I follow them.

In one of my groups, a member was feeling as if she couldn’t critique.  She didn’t know what to do or how to begin.  Leslee Anne Hewson shared two amazing resources.  The first is an overview of Critique Groups on Kidlit 411 which compiles links to a variety of resources.  The second is a list of Twenty Questions to Ask a Picture Book from Rachel Hamby.

These are wonderful resources, full of suggestions and things to think about, but they don’t focus on attitudes and mental approaches that can be the foundation of successful critiques.  Here are a few attitudes that it’s helpful for me to remember before I sit down to critique.

1.  It's the writer’s story.  It’s important to keep your critique partners intention for the story in mind when you review. Let’s say that a writer writes a story in rhyme.  You know rhyme is hard to sell, but you also see plenty of rhyme in the books you read. 

A good partner won’t try to convince the writer to rewrite in prose. Instead, a good partner might identify places where the meter or rhyme seem strained.  After all, it’s clear that this writer intends the story to be in rhyme. In this instance, it’s also important to find the story and the character as well.  I may not write in rhyme very often, but I know stories, and I have a trained ear.  So, I wouldn’t ask the writer to rewrite the story in prose, but I would ask questions and make suggestion so that my writing partner can write the best rhyming story possible.  Not only by thinking about the rhyme but also by thinking about the story as a whole. 

One of the hardest but truest critiques of one of my rhyming stories was that my story didn’t seem to have the narrative power for a book.  If my partner had only been looking at my rhyme, she might have missed the fact that the story wasn’t living up to a book-length narrative promise.  Her comments, hard as they were to hear, honored my intent.  I had to go back into the story and reexamine the narrative and character arcs.  Those tough comments helped me see the weaknesses in my story that the fun rhyme were covering up.

2.  Look for what’s going well.  I have to start here. I graded papers for so long that sometimes the negatives can take over.  I become a walking red pen.  I have learned to find the good in the story first.  This good appears both in my overall comments on the story and on the line edits.  I note lines that make me laugh, lines that seem just right, and lines that inspire me.  I always begin my critique comments with justly deserved praise, both general praise and specific praise, since general praise can sometimes seem false and generic if not backed up by specifics. 

3.  Find the places of tension.  Most drafts have places that slip—the voice changes, the language gets too formal or too casual, the story moves away from what seemed to be its intent.  Identifying those places of tension can show the writer where she might go back into the story to make it better.

4.  Don’t feel like you need to solve the writer’s problems.  If you have a suggestion, share it, but if you see a problem but don’t know how to fix it, feel free to just identify it. 

5.  Be careful with line edits.  Line editing can be helpful if a story seems nearly there, but if a story needs more work or some big revisioning, then line edits aren’t really helpful.  You can point out grammatical habits and vocabulary that don’t seem to benefit the story.   You might focus on words that can be deleted, but for the most part, in my critique groups, we’re still working on the big questions:  audience; tone and voice; beginnings, middles, and ends; etc.  If the writer is working on revisions, line edits can just be a distraction.  In my groups, if I think a story is mostly ready and I only want line edits, then I’ll ask.  

6.  Know that the writer owns the feedback once you’ve given it.  It’s a gift.  If they don’t find it useful, that’s fine.  You did your best and your comments helped the writer see her story again.  You don’t have to worry that you’ll give bad advice.  You don’t have to worry that you haven’t been hard enough.  The whole point of critique is to help the writer see the work again.  What she does with that work once she’s read your critique are up to her. 

The Magic of Everyday

Just like drinking enough water, immersing myself in words for some time each

day makes me happier and healthier.  Image © Lori Gravley.

I met with a poet I much admire this summer, and when I told him I aimed to write a poem every day his response was that he wasn’t sure that was a good idea. 

But he was over ten years younger than I am with four published, award-winning books. He has young children still at home. He has papers to grade and lessons to plan. Perhaps for him writing a poem a day or aiming to would be stifling, impossible, narcissistic.

My children are grown. I don’t have to grade or make lesson plans. I don’t expect that every poem I write will sparkle with wit and genius. Sometimes I know that what I’ve written as a poem is merely a journal entry with right hand line breaks.  But I have I don't have the patience or time to just sit and think about writing anymore. I hate to think about all the lines that have flown back into the universe because I was sitting and thinking but not writing. 

I’ll admit, I played with the idea last year that writing a poem a day might not be good for my writing (I even went days without writing a new poem), and, well, I did not find that to be true.. 

My best days were made better by thinking poetically, trying to find the beauty, the nugget, the word to catch that day or moment. My worst days were made better or at least made visible by my willingness to sit with what was and try to find the words to describe my suffering or ennui. My everyday was made better by my attention to the world and to my own interior life on a daily basis. When my children were younger and I had papers to grade, I could go months without giving myself that attention. 

If what the poet I spoke with meant was that writing a wonderful or even good poem everyday might be too high a thing to aspire to, I can fully agree with that. There is much dross in what I create each day. 

Sharon Olds mentioned during a talk on her recent (and wonderful) book Odes that she could never tell if a poem she was writing would be good or bad, so she just wrote a lot and let her judging self determine value after the generative work was complete. She estimated that fewer than ten percent of the poems she wrote were publishable, but that more might be brought to that point with some careful revision. That seems about right to me. 

Very few of the poems I write and rewrite each day (I do work on the poems until they are as close to what they seem to want to express as I can make them) are publishable just as they are. Most likely, that number for me is much fewer than ten percent. More poems have a nugget or spark that seem worth working with. The others (the larger percent of them) are just practice, free throw shots that hit the rim or glance off the backboard.

I guess I’m an artist who requires a lot of practice. I’m so thankful that I have space in my life now and the yearning to learn as much as I can about this craft I’ve devoted most of my life to.  Perhaps like Pablo Casals in his late sixties, after so many years of work, I’m happy to come to my craft each day. I, too, feel I’m making daily progress. Most importantly, I continue to take joy in my ability to do the work and in the time I have to do it. 

New Year, New Habits

My Digital Commonplace and Bullet Journal. Image © Lori Gravley

One of my big struggle as a writer has been seeing everything I do to forward my writing as writing work. 

I was just lying on the couch with a blanket over my feet when my husband walked in, sat down, and started talking to me.  We conversed for a while, and then he said, “What are you up to today, just chillin’?”

           

And I (somewhat defensively) said, “No, I’m working.” He raised an eyebrow.

“I’m a writer,” I said (perhaps still a bit defensively), “part of what I have to do for work is reading.”

“Oh, okay,” he said, “I wasn’t being critical.  Just chillin’ is okay.”

I apologized for being defensive. 

But I’ve been working on this over the last year, learning to credit my research, craft reading, and genre reading time as actual work time.  Obviously, I have some more work to do.

I recently read the advice (again) to stay off social media and email until I’d finished my daily writing goals.  And really, that seemed to me to be an invitation to look again at what my work was and what it wasn’t, to draw clear lines between work and socializing, between work and leisure. 

As a writer, those lines are often blurred.  So I’m test driving two new practices in my writing life. 

The first is a bullet journal, a physical journal in which I keep my datebook, my goals, my yearly calendar, and records of my intentions and my progress.  The small calendar I’ve used for years has served me well for a long time, but as my organizational development work has increased, it’s become more difficult to see my year as a whole and sometimes the days get filled up.  Also, there wasn’t enough space to track daily intentions the way I’ve been longing to do.

The next is a digital commonplace book.  I love commonplace books, and I’ve kept one in bits and pieces throughout the years, but physical commonplace books are a problem for me since I can’t read my own handwriting.  So, this year, to help track of my ideas for future projects, my research for smaller projects, my poetry starts, and quotes that move and inspire me, I’ve begun (I started in December) to keep a digital commonplace book on my desktop.  So far I have thirteen pages, and I haven’t quite figured out how to label and organize it, but I love having a place to keep my ideas.

I’ll write more about these new habits (and older ones) in January, but for now, I’m excited to be off to a great start on what look to be promising tools to remind me about all that do to advance my writing career even when it looks like I'm just chillin'.