Is there such a thing as a 'generalized' critique sheet?

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GeorgieB

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At the last meeting of our small writing group, which up until now seems to have been a "meet and chat" group, we decided that perhaps we should venture into actual critiques of our writings. Therein lies a problem...how do we critique each other? And, more importantly, keep the group on a non-shouting-at-each-other friendly level?

I searched the AW forums for a solution, looking for a checklist of some sort that might help...one that would lead the critiquer into providing constructive criticism without offending the writer, and found none.

The members of our group write mysteries, suspense, YA, chick-lit, children's stories, non-fiction, romance, some erotica...in short, most every genre. What I think we need is a sort of generalized checklist that could be used across all genres.

Does one exist? There must be AW'rs who also belong to a face-to-face group that have a list of "generalized rules" that we could use or adapt for our group. Maybe one that starts, "No personal attacks allowed."

Any suggestions? Help?
 

C.bronco

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It sounds like you have the start of a good form. I say build it as you see fit! You could break it down into categories like Overall Grammar, Clarity, Lyricism, Imagery, Plot, Characterization, Description, and maybe one for Writing Ticks, i.e. a writing tendency particular to a specific person.
Good luck!
 

IceCreamEmpress

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This is a really good checklist for critiquing science fiction/speculative fiction. I imagine you could make it more generic pretty easily--in any case, it might serve as a useful springboard for your group!
 

GeorgieB

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Thanks to all three of you...I should be able to compile a general checklist using those three sources.

George
 

HeronW

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I found this some years ago, slanted toward fantasy but it applies to other genres too:

Critiquing Lexicon

"Said" Bookism--Artificial, literary verb used to avoid the perfectly good word "said." "Said" is one of the few invisible words in the language; it is almost impossible to overuse. Infinitely less distracting than "he retorted," "she inquired," or the all-time favorite, "he ejaculated."

Tom Swifty--Similar compulsion to follow the word "said" (or "said" bookish) with an adverb. As in, "'We'd better hurry,' said Tom swiftly." Remember that the adverb is a leech sucking the strength from a verb. 99% of the time it is clear from the context how something was said.

"Burly Detective" Syndrome--Fear of proper names. Found in most of the same pulp magazines that abound with "said" bookisms and Tom Swifties. This is where you can't call Mike Shayne "Shayne" but substitute "the burly detective" or "the red-headed sleuth." Like the "said" bookish it comes from the entirely wrong-headed conviction that you can't use the same word twice in the same sentence, paragraph, or even page. This is only true of particularly strong and highly visible words, like, say, "vertiginous." It's always better to re-use an ordinary, simple noun or verb rather than contrive a cumbersome method of avoiding it.

Eyeball Kick--That perfect, telling detail that creates an instant visual image. The ideal of certain postmodern schools of SF is to achieve a "crammed prose" full of "eyeball kicks."

Pushbutton Words--used to evoke an emotional response without engaging the intellect or critical faculties. IE: "song" or "poet" or "tears" or "dreams," supposed to make us misty-eyed without quite knowing why. Most often found in story titles.

Bathos--Sudden change in level of diction. "The massive hound barked in stentorian voice then made wee-wee on the carpet."

Brand Name Fever--Use of brand name alone, without accompanying visual detail, to create false verisimilitude. You can stock a future with Hondas and Sonys and IBM's and still have no idea with it looks like.

Countersinking Expositional redundancy--Making the actions implied in a conversation explicit, e.g., "'Let's get out of here,' he said, urging her to leave."

Telling not Showing--Violates the cardinal rule of good writing. The reader should be allowed to react, not be instructed in *how* to react. Carefully observed details render authorial value judgments unnecessary. For instance, instead of telling us "she had a bad childhood, an unhappy childhood," specific incidents--involving, say, a locked closet and two jars of honey--should be shown.

Laughtrack Characters--give cues to the reader as to how to react. They laugh at their own jokes, cry at their own pain, and (unintentionally) feel everything so the reader doesn't have to.

Squid in the Mouth--Inappropriate humor in front of strangers. Basically the failure of an author to realize that certain assumptions or jokes are not shared by the world at large. In fact, the world at large will look upon such a writer as if they had a squid in their mouths.

Hand Waving--Distracting the reader with dazzling prose or other fireworks to keep them from noticing severe logic flaws.

You Can't Fire Me, I Quit--Attempt to diffuse lack of credibility with hand-waving. "I would never have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself." As if by anticipating the reader's objections the author had somehow answered them.

Fuzz--Element of motivation the author was too lazy to supply. The word "somehow" is an automatic tip-off to fuzzy areas of a story. "Somehow she forgot to bring her gun."

Dischism--Intrusion of author's physical surroundings or mental state into the narrative, ie: the character who always lights a cigarette when the author does, or is thinking about how they wished they hadn't quit smoking. In more subtle forms, the characters complain that they're confused and don't know what to do--when this is actually the author's condition.

Bogus Alternatives--List of actions a character could have taken, but didn't. Frequently includes all the reasons why. A type of Dischism in which the author works out complicated plot problems at the reader's expense. "If I'd gone along with the cops they would have found the gun in my purse. And anyway, I didn't want to spend the night in jail. I suppose I could have just run instead of stealing their car, but then..." etc. Best dispensed with entirely.

False Interiorization--Another Dischism, in which the author, too lazy to describe the surroundings, inflicts the viewpoint character with space sickness, a blindfold, etc.

White Room Syndrome--Author's imagination fails to provide details. Most common in the beginning of a story. "She awoke in a white room." The white room is obviously the white piece of paper confronting the author. The character has just woken up in order to ponder her circumstances and provide an excuse for infodump.

Infodump--Large chunk of indigestible expository matter intended to explain the background situation. This can be overt, as in fake newspaper or "Encyclopedia Galactica" articles inserted in the text, or covert, in which all actions stops as the author assumes center stage and lectures.

Stapeldon--Name assigned to the voice which takes center stage to lecture. Actually a common noun, as: "You have a Stapledon come on to answer this problem instead of showing the characters resolve it."

Card Tricks in the Dark--Authorial tricks to no visible purpose. The author has contrived an elaborate plot to arrive at a) the punchline of a joke no one else will get b) some bit of historical trivia. In other words, if the point of your story is that this kid is going to grow up to be Joseph of Arimathea, there should be sufficient internal evidence for us to figure this out.

The Jar of Tang--"For you see, we are all living in a jar of Tang!" or "For you see, I am a dog!" Mainstay of the old Twilight Zone TV show. An entire pointless story contrived so the author can cry "Fooled you!" This is a classic case of the difference between a conceit and an idea. "What if we all lived in a jar of Tang?" is an example of the former; "What if the revolutionaries from the sixties had been allowed to set up their own society?" is an example of the latter. Good fiction requires ideas, not conceits.

Abbess phone home--Takes its name from a mainstream story about a medieval cloister which was sold as SF because of the serendipitous arrival of a UFO at the end. By extension, any mainstream story with a gratuitous SF or fantasy element tacked on so it could be sold.

Deus ex Machina--Miraculous solution to an otherwise insoluble problem. Look, the Martians all caught cold and died!

Plot Coupons--The true structure of the quest-type fantasy novel. The "hero" collects sufficient plot coupons (magic sword, magic book, magic cat) to send off to the author for the ending. Note that "the author" can be substituted for "the Gods" in such a work: "The Gods decreed he would pursue this quest." Right, mate. The author decreed he would pursue this quest until sufficient pages were filled to procure an advance.

"As You Know Bob"--The most pernicious form of Info Dump. In which the characters tell each other things they already know, for the sake of getting the reader up to speed.

I've suffered for my Art (and now it's your turn). Research dump.--A form of Info Dump in which the author inflicts upon the reader irrelevant, but hard-won bits of data acquired while researching the story.

Reinventing the Wheel--In which the novice author goes to enormous lengths to create a situation already familiar to the experienced reader. You most often see this when a highly regarded mainstream writer tries to write an SF novel without actually reading any of the existing stuff first (because it's all obviously crap anyway). Thus you get endless explanations of, say, how an atomic war might get started by accident. Thank you, but we've all read that already. Also you get tedious explanations by physicists of how their interstellar drive works. Unless it impacts the plot, we don't care.

Used Background--Use of a background out of Central Casting. Rather than invent a background and have to explain it, or risk re-inventing the wheel, let's just steal one. We'll set it in the Star Trek Universe, only we'll call it the Empire instead of the Federation.

Space Western--The most pernicious suite of used furniture. The grizzled space captain swaggering into the spacer bar and slugging down a Jovian brandy, then laying down a few credits for a space hooker to give him a Galactic Rim Job.

The Edges of Ideas--The solution to the Info Dump problem (how to fill in the background). The theory is that, as above, the mechanics of an interstellar drive (the center of the idea) is not important: all that matters is the impact on your characters: they can get to other planets in a few months, and, oh yeah, it gives them hallucinations about past lives. Or, more radically: the physics of TV transmission is the center of an idea; on the edges of it we find people turning into couch potatoes because they no longer have to leave home for entertainment. Or, more bluntly: we don't need info dump at all. We just need a clear picture of how people's lives have been affected by their background. This is also known as "carrying extrapolation into the fabric of daily life."

The Grubby Apartment Story --Writing too much about what you know. The kind of story where the starving writer living in the grubby apartment writes a story about a starving writer in a grubby apartment. Stars all his friends.

Infohiding--Withholding crucial information from the reader that the POV knows. Used to create cheap tension without having a necessarily tense plot. "Bob felt all his energy focused as he pried off the heavy lid from the sarcophagus. Bob knew from the hieroglyphics what he'd find. Upon seeing its wondrous contents, he suddenly knew how he would wreak his revenge on Anne. He heard a noise. 'Keep back; you know me -- you know I'll shoot,' Bob warned the advancing figure." This jars the reader out of the POV's view, reminding them there's an Author out there pulling the strings. Solution: tell the reader outright anything the POV sees/knows that is of relevance; if it's not a tense item in itself, chances are it will be a letdown when the reader does find out, so make the thing itself tense, and let the reader share it with the POV. Alternatively, if you need to keep something hidden, present it from a POV who can't find out what's in there either; then the reader is not reminded they're not the POV (though the hidden thing itself should still be interesting and worthy of being hidden).

Author Needs You to Know--Dialog or action that blatantly has no purpose other than to educate the reader about some important story detail. Usually a failed attempt to smoothly work in an infodump; cousin of the As You Know Bob. "'Do you really need it spelled out?' Bob ranted. 'We [followed by explanation]..." Or, "So, boss, remind me what time I'm supposed to whack the president?" Or, "Say, Captain, do we have enough fuel to reach Tau Ceti, our destination, in our scheduled time of six months?"

The Capitalization Syndrome of Death--This is where the author, for some reason or another, feels like every Word deserves Capitalization so to heighten its Importance. Found most often in fantasy novels.

Random Hunting and Pecking--Writing words that are not pronouncable. Like Lymlpsfdash in a mock foreign language.

MacArthur--A bad manuscript which "shall return."

The Idiot Plot--This is a plot which can only work if every character is an idiot.

The Rug Jerk--Any gratuitous plot or character twist tossed in solely to jerk the rug out from under the reader for the sake of surprise or shock, without sufficient foundation, foreshadowing or justification (retroactive or otherwise). Essentially any story twist that violates Chekhov's principles: "If you fire a gun in Act III, it must be seen on the wall in Act I; and if you show a gun on the wall in Act I, it must be fired in Act III." The Rug Jerk fires the gun without showing it first or explaining where it came from afterwards.

The Reset Switch, aka The Reboot--Any device that allows a writer to completely erase any already-occurred events of a story and bring the characters back to a predefined starting point, with little or no changes to them or their universe. Time travel ("It never happened"), parallel universes ("It never happened *here*"), unconscious duplicates ("We're all just clones/simulations/androids of the REAL characters!") and dream-sequences ("It was all a dream!") have all been used this way. To be avoided unless the existence of such a phenomenon is, itself, the story's or series' central plot point (as in *The Man Who Folded Himself* or *The Left Hand of Darkness*).
 

Susan Breen

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I can tell you that at the classes I teach at Gotham, we start off by establishing the rule that everyone has to say one positive thing, and one constructive thing. Also, you have to be specific and you can't repeat what everyone else has said. Once everyone has had a turn, then we move on to a more general discussion of character and plot. Those are almost always the big issues. You want to avoid having one person monopolize the conversation and you also want to avoid having people say, "I would write it like this..." It's important to respect what it was the author was trying to do in the first place.
 

BlueLucario

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According to Dr. Andrew Burt, all critiques are nothing more than personal opinions of the critter, meaning that there are no rules of writing nor any arbitrors of rightness.

If critiques are just opinions, why does it sound like the critter is right? My story is horrible, I should fix this and that.
 

Stew21

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According to Dr. Andrew Burt, all critiques are nothing more than personal opinions of the critter, meaning that there are no rules of writing nor any arbitrors of rightness.

If critiques are just opinions, why does it sound like the critter is right? My story is horrible, I should fix this and that.
Sometimes the critter has more experience and education with which to back his critique. Sometimes critters provide evidence from the piece that prove their opinion to be true. And there are rules of writing: grammar, for one.
 
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DaddyCat

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According to Dr. Andrew Burt, all critiques are nothing more than personal opinions of the critter, meaning that there are no rules of writing nor any arbitrors of rightness.

If critiques are just opinions, why does it sound like the critter is right? My story is horrible, I should fix this and that.

I take critiques as a random sampling of my future readers. When a critter spots a problem, it means that something in the piece didn't work for them. Much more often than not, it's something I need to address in revisions.
 

GeorgieB

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I can tell you that at the classes I teach at Gotham, we start off by establishing the rule that everyone has to say one positive thing, and one constructive thing. Also, you have to be specific and you can't repeat what everyone else has said. Once everyone has had a turn, then we move on to a more general discussion of character and plot. Those are almost always the big issues. You want to avoid having one person monopolize the conversation and you also want to avoid having people say, "I would write it like this..." It's important to respect what it was the author was trying to do in the first place.


In our group's discussion about our moving to a critique session, we agreed that we would do very much the same thing. The critique checklist/rule instruction sheet we envisioned would state those rules as the very first item.

We may be a small group, but are a friendly bunch, and want to keep it that way.

Thanks for the reply.
 

GeorgieB

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I found this some years ago, slanted toward fantasy but it applies to other genres too:

Critiquing Lexicon

[removed to save space in my reply, but save locally on my computer!]

That's a great list of definitions! I'll more than likely use that for our list as a reminder that not all mistakes (errors!) in a manuscript are grammar-related or POV changes or whatever.
 
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