Writing groups -- they can be good for you

So your manuscript is done. Everyone (and by everyone, I mean, your friends and family) seems to like it. But after you make some calls and send some letters, all you're getting is crickets and tumbleweeds. Could your writing not be as good as Hemingway, as you first thought?

Murderati breaks it down. You may want to consider joining a writing group. Like any grouping of people, writers groups come with pros and cons. Here's what Murderati says makes for a good group:

1. Rules
This isn't a social hour, it's a work session. The group I belong to follows the basic guidelines set up by Clarion. You can read two good articles on this here (how to workshop) and here (insights into how to react when being critiqued).
2. Trust
Participants need to feel that everyone in the group has the same goal when they're reading and critiquing: to help each other write and tell the best stories possible. That's it.
Do I need to mention NO STEALING? I sure hope not.
3. Commitment
Participants have to be willing to read the good and the bad, and to treat each submission -- and each member -- with utter respect. No showing up without having read the submissions, no comments without considered rationale.
4. Confidentiality
Only gab or complain about participants in the group IN the group -- and rarely do that, if ever. Keep mum about other people's works-in-progress.
5. Similar levels of writing experience
It's uncomfortable and inappropriate to have writers with vastly different levels of experience in the same group. If you do, some participants become "experts" while others are peons. How can you possibly nourish the useful kind of democracy that promotes honest communication in that case? I don't think it can happen.

Meanwhile, PoeWar has a list of things you can do that will most definitely annoy fellow group members. A smattering:

10 Ways to Annoy the Hell out of your Writers’ Group

• Attend sporadically. Most writers’ groups have rules about attendance, but once you are there, what are they going to do? Do they seriously have the stones to kick you out? I think not. Writers are usually nice people — exploit that.
• Bring the whole novel. Most writers’ groups try to keep the length of the things they are discussing to a reasonable level. After all, most members have jobs or kids or classes. Some members even want to spend time on their own writing. They can’t be expected to read and critique hundred of pages a week… or can they? After all, the main reason the group exists is to serve your needs.
• Don’t worry about the genre. The science fiction writer’s group is the perfect place to present your nihilistic seventies romance. If anyone makes a fuss, tell them that they’re stifling you.
• Don’t waste a lot of time reading the other member’s work. Try to limit any review to the five minutes before the group meets. Make a show of marking up the paper with red lines or a highlighter. Just pick random passages to mark. There’s always something wrong with everything if you look hard enough.
• Keep an eye out for typos or spelling errors. Some writers think that a writers’ group should focus on character, plot, themes and other esoteric things. Stick to the basics. If you find a spelling error or a grammar error, focus solely on that. Make sure the discussion lasts twenty minutes at least. By discussion I mean you prattling on, interrupting other people whenever they try to take part.
• Keep other criticisms as vague as possible. Look for statements that sound intelligent but mean nothing. String them together for as long as you can. Sample Rant: You need this story to feel more real. It doesn’t speak to me yet. When I read it, it feels like a story. It’s as if someone wrote it down and expected me to read it and come away with some sort of impression. I shouldn’t have to know so much about the characters in order to get them. They should be a part of the page. The whole thing should function holistically and organically.
  

I know Cake Man touched on this before, way back in the pre-suckerman days, so I'll toss in my two cents. I find that being in a writers' group to be a great motivator. Knowing that I have a meeting coming up and should crank out some pages really helps me get in front of my computer and WRITE. Which is a good thing.

The tricky thing for me is, since I'm writing a novel, I'm going to have a lot more pages to present before I'm "finished." Pretty much everyone else is working on a specific screenplay, which probably won't clock in over 200 pages. But that's overly technical and something that is easily resolved. I find the feedback you get in the group to be very helpful. Obviously, like anything else, you have to parse through the notes and suggestions and decide "is this helpful?" Your initial instinct when dealing with harsh commentary is to toss it and chalk it up to the person not "understanding" what you're trying to do. But once you do that, you might as well stop coming to the meetings. The best part of a writers group is that you're getting an initial, ideally unfiltered reaction from a wide spectrum of readers. This is what you want. You want to see how Joe Regular Reader reacts to your material. Will they keep reading? What made them stop reading? Those are the things that are really invaluable.

Can a bad review kill your career? Short version: Yes

At least Murderati thinks so:

There's one time in particular when an author is particularly vulnerable to the effects of a devastating review, and that's when you are a debut author. An editor who takes on a first-time novelist is taking a risk on someone who's untried in the marketplace. The editor hopes, of course, that the debut novel will be wildly successful, or at a minimum, earn back its advance And to increase the chances of its success, this editor will talk up the book to the sales force. As the pub date approaches, she hopes that in-house enthusiasm for the book builds, because that enthusiasm gets transferred to booksellers, who will be convinced to increase their orders. Hefty orders mean more exposure, better displays, and of course better sales. Imagine you are that debut author, and your novel "FIRST TIME OUT" has been bought with a generous advance. Imagine that the publishing house is telling you this is going to be an important book. Imagine that they have decided to give it a big push, with major ads and an author tour.

Then imagine that your first review appears in Publishers Weekly, and they pronounce it a disaster. They call your publisher a house of idiots for buying it.

Now your editor looks like a dope. The enthusiasm at your publishing house suddenly deflates like a popped balloon. Everyone there feels a bit embarrassed, not just for you, but for themselves. The big bookstore orders don't come in. Costco and Walmart take a pass on it. Even before your book goes on sale, it already feels like a big failure and an expensive mistake.

Those promised ads never materialize. And even though they do send you on book tour, every time you meet a bookseller, you just know they're looking at you and thinking, "oh, so you're the author whom PW called illiterate." And you feel like such a loser.

I have to agree here. If you're established, your reputation and career can withstand a few middling and out-and-out bad reviews -- look at some of the stalwarts of modern crime fiction like Lehane, Pelecanos and Price. Not all their books were critical darlings. Heck, EW gave Pelecanos' latest a pretty negative write-up (not that EW is the ba-all-end-all in literary circles, mind you, but I digress) and not many people liked Lehane's Shutter Island. But at both points in each author's career, these guys were/are already established. Had Pelecanos gotten ripped when A Firing Offense came out, he might not be writing today. At least, it'd be harder for him to get published.

Especially if your editor has gone out on a limb for you and really pushed to get you published, an initial wave of negative reviews will, as the post says, make the editor doubt themselves and also weaken their arguments internally to get the book some support. And, let's face it. Without marketing support, a first-time author is going to have trouble laying claim to any of the marketplace. I know that sounds number-crunchy and corporate, but it's the truth.

This post is particularly relevant to me because SILENT CITY is my first novel, and if it does find a home where an editor decides it's worth publishing, it really needs reviewer support to make any kind of dent with readers. Crime fiction readers are pretty insular, so you really need to court the key literary publications and also the crime fiction tastemakers. A bad review from a key person in the field and, while you may not be sunk fully, you'll definitely be behind the eightball.

As a reader, though, how strong an influence do reviews have on your buying habits? Where do you find the best reviews?

Muderati on story structure, building a second act

Alexandra Sokoloff, writing at crime fiction blog Murderati, has been posting a series of pieces dissecting story structure and the elements of a strong, dramatic story.

She's just posted her thoughts on Act 2:

Act Two is summed up by the greats such as, like, you know, Aristotle - as “Rising Tension” or “Progressive Complications”. Or in the classic screenwriting formula: Act One is “Get the Hero Up a Tree”, and Act Two is “Throw Rocks at Him” (and for the impatient out there, like Toni, the end-skipper, I’ll reveal that Act Three is; “Get Him Down.”)

All true enough, but a tad vague for my taste.

So let’s get more specific.

The beginning of the second act of a book or film (30 minutes or thirty script pages into a film, 100 or so pages into a book) – can often be summed up as “Into the Special World” or “Crossing the Threshold”. Dorothy opening the door of her black and white house and stepping into Technicolor Oz one of the most famous and graphic examples… Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole is another. The passageway to the special world might be particularly unique… like the wardrobe in THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE; that between-the-numbers subway platform in the HARRY POTTER series; Alice again, going THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS; the tornado in THE WIZARD OF OZ; the blue pill (or was it the red pill?) in THE MATRIX; or the tesseract in A WRINKLE IN TIME.

This step might come in the first act, or somewhat later in the second act, but it’s generally the end or beginning of a sequence – think of ALIEN (the landing on the planet to investigate the alien ship), STAR WARS, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARC, going out on the ocean in that too-small boat in JAWS, flying down to Cartagena in ROMANCING THE STONE, flying to Rio in NOTORIOUS, stopping at the Bates Motel in PSYCHO. It’s often the beginning of an actual, physical journey in an action movie; in a ghost story it is entering the haunted house (or haunted anything). It’s a huge moment and deserves special weight.

Obviously, this is useful beyond the world of crime fiction, but fiction in general, in any form. Here are her thoughts on creating your first act.

And, you savvy Connelly fans will find a quick reference to our favorite anti-hero, Detective Harry Bosch, in the first section of the post, where Sokoloff responds to an email about characters changing over longer periods of time (many books vs. one). Interesting reading.