I mean I am always open to tips.
the more I can absorb right now, the less I have to edit later :P
it's also why I try to help where I can publicly so that others can call me out if I have the wrong idea somewhere lol
Ok, here goes!
I sent this as an email for my local critique group early on. I'd already been in an online critique community and figured I could share some of the things I learned. I wanted to post it here to see if you agree or disagree with any of it and so that YOU could share YOUR craft advice too. Alright, everything beneath this is from the email:
I thought I'd just share some things I've learned in critique. Take or leave as it suits you.
1. Prologues: Don't. If you need a prologue, it means you don't know how to fold world-building into your writing. There are no good prologues. You're asking your reader to begin your story twice. The best you can hope for is a tolerable prologue. Tolerable means that you sit through it in order to get to the actual story. Please don't ask your readers to do this. So why do so many beginning writers write prologues? It's cheap, easy world-building. It's a place to info-dump.
2. Start of story: Don't start your story any sooner than is absolutely necessary for your reader to understand. What that means is that if the beginning of your story is really backstory, don't start there. Don't start with world building. Epic Fantasy folks have a little bit of leeway here, but only a little. Why do we start our stories too early? Because it's shit we, as authors, need to know about our characters. The reader doesn't need to know these things, except in passing or as a brief recap. It'll be in your first draft because it might need to be for YOU to understand your characters. Take it out and start at the latest possible moment in order to make your story comprehensible to your reader. Use beta readers to determine whether you've started too soon. Beta readers can't be friends or family—they're not reliable.
3. Don't use 'was-verbing' unless it's truly contemporaneous to what's happening. Examples of proper use of 'was-verbing': "He was rifling through her purse when she walked into the room." That's reasonable because it's better than "He rifled through her purse as she walked into the room". He was doing it before she entered the scene and you're describing that he's also currently doing it. This is especially true if, in this instance, your POV is hers and not his. Why do we so often write 'was-verbing'? Because we're writing the story as we see it and it's the most natural way to write it. There's gonna be a lot of 'was-verbing' in your first drafts. You have to go back in and change 'was standing' to 'stood'. It's easier for the reader. Also, every incidence of 'was-verbing' changes a unique verb into a repetitive 'was' version simply by the inclusion of 'was'. It makes all the verbs sound the same. Killing it auto-magically makes your writing less repetitive.
4. POV changes must be earned. What does that mean? It means don't start your second chapter with a POV change. The exception is romance, where a 'her POV', 'his POV' is common and quite natural. It doesn't work for epic fantasy. We need to become attached to your character before your POV changes. A great time to change POV is on a cliff-hanger because, although the reader doesn't want to change POV, they'll tolerate it to find out what happens to the character they've now become attached to. While they're suffering the POV change, you MUST strive to make the next character as compelling as your first. If you do it right, the reader will be thrilled every time you change POV after the first few.
5. No adverbs in dialogue tags. '"What do you mean?" she asked bashfully.' We should read 'bashful' in the dialogue and what has preceded it. If we can't, you need to sharpen your dialogue. Most often I see this when the author doesn't trust the reader to get it, so they hit them over the head in the dialogue tag. What I mean is that 'bashful' is in the dialogue or the action tag, but the writer doesn't trust the reader to 'get it'. You can't cure idiocy. Don't even try. If it's there, the reader hears it. Exceptions include: Slowly, quickly, etc., because there you're actually showing how the dialogue should read. Some people will still bash you for using it, but I think that it's acceptable. That's me, not a golden rule. Another exception: Always use an adverb when the alternative will be clunky. What I mean is that I've never seen a 'show' version of 'gingerly' that wasn't more awkward than the word 'gingerly'.
6. Structure notes: The 'inciting incident' should happen within the first 25% of your novel. The inciting incident is the thing that means that life can't go on as normal. The man finds his wife in bed with someone else, the portal to the next dimension appears, the character comes across an orphan and has to re-think how he approaches his life. This is a lot more vague in 'literary fiction', which means you have to be a hell of a lot better writer to pull it off.
7. Try to reduce filtering. We talked about this briefly in group, but what this means is that you want to limit your use of 'heard', 'saw', etc. We assume the viewpoint is from the POV indicated, but when you draw attention to it, it has the bizarre effect of distancing the reader. I used the example: "She heard a shot from the other side of the room." The reader assumes it's what the POV character heard, so state it as, "A shot rang out from across the room." This allows the reader to identify with the character instead of coming to the realization that the character is not THEM. The exception here is that sometimes you need to let the reader know that it's something specific to the character. "She'd heard the news, and it wasn't pretty." (Note to critique readers: You're gonna find a lot of this in my work because I have a lot of 'internal' stuff for an action genre. Point it out, because I can't always see it and it's like sleeping with a stripper…you'll never get the glitter out of the sheets. It's just everywhere for some of us and we need to have it pointed out.)
8. Adverbs. You've heard adverbs are bad, right? But why are they bad? They're only bad because they serve to shore up a weak verb. "Walked slowly" is "crept". "Listened attentively" is better described by showing the facial expression and movements of the character. If you keep this in mind, you'll still use adverbs occasionally (see what I did there?), but you won't overuse them and you won't use them for the wrong reason. You can break any rule you want if you know WHY the rule exists and address it.
9. Take a drill and lobotomize the part of your brain that has learned the word 'really'. Really. You almost never need it. Exceptions include dialogue, because people honestly talk that way. While you're drilling into your grey matter, remove the word 'almost', at least for fiction except for dialogue. You can do anything you want in dialogue because people speak like imbeciles. This is especially true if they're talking to someone to whom they are attracted.
10. Dialogue should convey verisimilitude, but it should skip the shit the reader doesn't want to hear. This includes 'um' unless you need it to emphasize a pause. PLEASE LISTEN CLOSELY TO THIS: Skip 'dialogue preamble' like 'Well,'. or 'Yes,'. Yup, we use it when we speak, but you can cut it and no one will miss it and it'll make your dialogue sing. ALSO THIS: People do NOT regularly use a person's name when they speak because they're literally talking to the person they're addressing. Use names as emphasis. Think of them as chili peppers—too much and it's inedible.
11. Dialogue again: Never have your characters discuss shit they already know. Try not to have them think about it either. This makes it hard to build your world, but you need to find a way around it. Personally, I use 'naive' characters so that explaining makes sense. ****** is using tweens, so that should work, though they already know a lot. I don't know enough about ****'s character because I didn't get that far in the reading. I know NOTHING of********'s characters because she didn't read from her work.
12. Structure again, because it was mentioned: You MAY have a natural instinct for structure. It may be your strength and it's why you see authors like King advise against outlines or clear structure goals. The thing is, you can't teach that which comes naturally to you—you do it automatically, so many authors avoid talking about structure because it DOES naturally come to them. Use critique and betas to find out whether you really can 'pants' it or not. Many can, but some writers absolutely can't find a plot with a flashlight and decoder ring. If that's you, you need to know as early as possible so that you can plan more. This doesn't make you a worse writer. The only bad writers are writers who don't know what they're bad at and don't come up with systems to help them.
13. Equivocation: The word 'seem' should rarely appear in your work. You're writing from the POV of your character and you need to get it across, even if it's wrong. A character can be mistaken (and it's fun to use that when you can), but write it as though it's definitively what's happening. Don't use "a little". It's vague as a quantity and it equivocates when, almost always, such equivocation is both unnecessary and detrimental to your narrative.
14. Adjectives, too many. Not every noun needs an adjective. I see it a lot in early work and I STILL do it a lot and have to pull it out. What's IMPORTANT to emphasize? Emphasize that. You saw in my own work that I used 'vestigial tub'. I've been hammered for it because the tub isn't important enough for a ten dollar adjective.
15. THIS BLEW MY MIND: You can skip 'transportation'. Look at movies. You don't need to show them crossing a street, you can simply place them on the other side and trust that the reader knows how they got there. My third chapter takes a direct cut to a bar with a VERY brief description of why my MC is there now and how it happened. One reader has suggested that I show the details. I want to kill this reader because it's bad advice. She suggested it because she doesn't know the characters very well yet and wanted 'flavor'. The flavor comes later and in the midst of things. Salt is good IN something, but by itself…I dunno, I guess it kills leaches. It isn't good by itself.
16. MOAR STRUCTURE!! The 'turning point' should happen by the middle of your novel. The 'turning point' comes when the character has tried the easy way out and it hasn't worked. They accept that they need to change something fundamental. Usually, they hate it. They hate it for the same reason you hate it when your spouse moves your shoes—it takes extra effort and it's awkward and kind of a pain in the ass. Here's the thing about the turning point—from here on out, your character is proactively doing shit, not just reacting to the shit done to her. If you wait too long for this change to happen, people will clobber you with 'passive MC' slurs. Yes, you can kill them, but then you have to change your structure because they're right.
17. Don't give your readers what they want. Is there a misunderstanding in a relationship? Drag it out. Have them be interrupted before anyone can apologize. Giving your characters or your readers what they want kills momentum. If you DO give it to them, take it back in a painful way. My MC gets to have her love for a side character requited briefly before it's yanked away. Then you get both the joy of the kiss and the pain of the separation. Let your reader taste victory early on if you're a bastard like me, but there is no victory of any kind till the end of the novel (and there should be a turd on the wedding cake if you want to turn it into a series).
18. "Things happen" isn't a plot. There needs to be increasing urgency and tension. Exception: "Literary Fiction". However, if you're writing lit, every sentence better give the reader an orgasm, because anything short of that will fail in an embarrassing way.
19. Addendum to number 18: You can't go balls to the wall all the time. Sometimes you DO have to let the reader catch their breath or even give them something small so that you're not writing Life Sucks, Why Don't You Kill Yourself Already, a Novel.
20. You probably already know most of what I've said here. I didn't and so that's why I'm writing this. It's not because I know things. I don't know anything. It's depressing. I'm still very much in the conscious incompetence stage of writing. It's just that it's (barely) better than unconscious incompetence. It's more painful than unconscious incompetence, too. Fuck. I need a beer.
