I'm delighted to have been asked to write a guest post on a new website called multi-story.co.uk (link at end, please read on). It's aimed at short fiction writers (although no height limit is specified, haha, joke) and runs competitions. I'm not known as a flash fiction / short story writer myself, but a couple of my blog posts provoked the site owners into contacting me. They'd also read and enjoyed Peril and gave me some coverage (hopefully I'll get the same for The Baptist!)
Multi-story looks like a very interesting site for those in shorts, offering respectable prizes, judging by professionals, low entry fee and a very comprehensive list of resources on the links page.
The chosen guest subject was one close to my heart - the trials and tribulations of writers that cut their teeth in the ether of peer review writing websites. I was that soldier. Delighted to say that one elephant joke was allowed. Here's the article...
Except for the lucky few, we’ve all been there: typed the closing lines of our first completed work of fiction; sighed with contentment; packaged the manuscript in a glossy folder depicting dolphins or kittens; anointed the query letter with a dab of perfume and presented Mrs Murphy at the Post Office with half a dozen packets of literary heaven.
‘Yes, Mrs Murphy, all this time, living in your midst, like a normal person. I am a writer!’ (Adopts mincing stride and a flourish of the hand).
Next day’s walk to work is on air, knowing that there won’t be many more such mundane days because the agent, publisher and film producer are in a bare-knuckle fight over who will make the most money from that blockbusting masterpiece now winging its way to the literary world.
A few celebratory bottles of wine and several days later the self-satisfaction of the perfectly packaged bundles is wearing off. A couple of weeks and you decide to redecorate walls of your study with all the rejection slips that begin to flood through the letterbox like Hogwarts invitations arriving at the Dursleys’. Clearly the agents and publishers you selected weren’t selected carefully enough. Might the action adventure of a philandering power generation engineer’s international swashbuckling be a little out of their genre? Writers and Artists Year Book in hand, you print another batch of submissions, make a mad dash to the stationers and endure sweaty tussles with other anguished authors over the last remaining large Jiffy bag. Another few weeks and a second wall of the study gets papered with the next wave of responses.
The logical next step presents itself. Consult an expert. Hand over a tidy sum of money to a professional third party in return for a critique of the manuscript, to try and understand why the rejections keep coming. A nice little man, with a peculiar talent for acidity, points out that characters, plot, pace & structure, use of language, narrative voice (what’s that?), dialogue, settings and theme are all awry. But the query letter is nicely fragrant. A discussion of these results with family and friends reveals that any number of them would have happily given you a similar kick in the privates for much less money than you paid to a stranger.
So, now you’ve been battered about the head with what is wrong with the masterwork, how do you put it right? A formal creative writing course is out of the question because you’re broke / agoraphobic / living in the middle of nowhere / in a foreign country / in custody. A bit of internet research reveals that you are not alone. There are global communities of aspiring writers posting their work online, critiquing each other’s efforts and striving to rise above the hoi polloi. Free-to-join websites run by reputable folk. Prizes of professional critique by editors from the big publishing houses. Success stories of authors that have been discovered and offered seven figure publishing contracts. You sign up, format your manuscript for online consumption and prepare for greatness. You are officially in a writers’ group. Happy days.
What happens next depends upon the architecture of the peer review website. In any case, a burst of compulsive activity is likely. You are a newbie and, unless you are somehow familiar with online communities and forums, all those beginners’ mistakes await you. Strangers will offer friendship. Strangers will crawl all over your literary masterpiece and tear the flesh from its bones. Internet trolls await, running out to engage you in flame wars of words if you should clop too loudly across their bridge.
You begin to gather feedback on the pages that you posted for virtual consumption. This involves a reciprocal arrangement with other writers, either in a structured one-for-one review system or through social networking. All of a sudden you’re not just a writer, you’re also a reader, a reviewer, a critic. Folk expect you to be able to constructively critique their work. You make mistakes, go with trends like less is more, show not tell, and where to stick your Oxford
Month three of online peer review and there aren’t enough hours in the day, enough days in the week, to do enough reviews, to earn enough credits for reviews of your own work, to network friends, to climb the mountain of the charts and attain that Holy Grail of a pro-crit. Waves of self-doubt wash across your frontal lobe as your chart ranking fluctuates. Newbie reviewers play havoc with your scores as they deliver novice critique of your work. You start to frequent the discussion forum and find solace in the company of other authors, your seniority growing. Is first person, post-modernist narrative voice passé? Should you rewrite in a less florid or less minimalist style to elicit more favourable reviews from the peer group? There seems to be a hard-core clique that know the secrets to all this, the mechanism of the charts and how to spam to the top without being seen to spam. It’s a tough time, you’re not getting anything written except reviews of other people’s work and you’re neglecting the ironing.
Month six and you’ve become a firm member of the old guard. Respected by veterans, dissed by paranoid newbies, considered a part of that alleged clique. Your revised work is doing well and it’s on final ascent to the summit of the charts. Your extended social network is brought into play, posting support requests on Facebook, Twitter and every form of social media known to authors and readers. The last day of the month approaches, there’s a photo finish, a Steward’s appeal and yes, you’re a winner! High fives all round, virtual back-slapping and emoticons aplenty on the forum.
The long wait begins. Will the professional critique confirm your writing skill, honed by crash-course experience in the intense editing and critiquing world of online peers? In the interim, you arse about on the forum, see off a few trolls and grace a few newbies with gratis reviews and critiques. Just for fun you designate a particular aspect of creative writing as your special focus area for the day, using Mittelmark & Newman’s How Not to Write a Novel as your bible.
On Mondays you severely and mercilessly critique a piece, soundly and resolutely thrashing it for excessive use of adverbs.
Tuesdays are an attack on two-dimensional characters, asking that they be fleshed out so that they leap from the page.
Wednesdays you add a little extra, advising the writer to titillate the senses by making sure that all settings are a tasteful olfactory, tactile, audiovisual experience.
Thursdays are the day to attack any speech tag other than ‘said’.
Friday is for fish and you go angling for inadvertent red herrings that mislead the reader.
Saturday deals with the identity parade syndrome, taking down an author or two that uses a mirror or other blatant device to give a photo-fit description of characters with big dark eyes, silken hair, a matching twin set in cornflower blue and average size breasts.
Sunday you weed out the clichés from a newbie’s work and leave them with the bare bones of a plot that then magically takes on the tone a Scandinavian detective drama.
You’ve discovered the power to weave straw into gold. Your username is by now well known on the site and has a well-earned reputation for being firm but fair. Empowered by the journey, it’s time to launch new forum discussion threads about the fine differences between similes and metaphors, the plausibility of hyperbole, and to draw attention to an outbreak of anthropomorphism in the newbie writings you have come across. Wikipedia serves you particularly well in the formulation of your position on these matters.
At last the professional critique of your novel opening chapters arrives online. Some jumped-up junior editor from a big publishing house has totally panned your labour of love. Two-dimensional characters. The plot premise is unbelievable. Stilted dialogue. Over-described, over-told, indefinite genre, unmarketable. It has to be a mistake. The reviewer must have read a different book to the one that tens, hundred of people have voted for with their virtual feet. You followed their suggestions to the letter, those experienced online authors with knowledge of narrative voice, point of view, story arcs, prologues, scene, sequels, antagonists, conflict, protagonist, sensory perception. The result was almost edible and some young know-nothing has regurgitated it in your face, in public, for thousands of peers to see. Well, she’s obviously wrong. To hell with the dead-tree publishers. You go straight to Kindle Direct Publishing and begin to upload your novel as an independent e-book. That’ll show them.
I’ll finish with a parable. Six blind men were asked to describe an elephant by touching its body. One felt the tail and said that the elephant was like a hairy rope. Another grasped a leg and said that it resembled a tree. A third handled the ear and was sure that it was a great flying bat. The fourth was snuffled by the trunk and said that an elephant was a mighty snake, bigger than a python. The tusk was touched by another who claimed that it was surely a unicorn. The sixth found its huge eye and knew that it must be a giant squid. None of them could describe the hole. [sic]
multi-story.co.uk is a new website aimed at short fiction writers. It has some very interesting content and an excellent links page.
No authors were hurt in the making of this post.
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Sue wrote: 'Nice post, Mark, but I think it's fair to say that you can learn a lot about writing in a short time by joining a peer review site. The trick is to quit while you're ahead - before you're completely bored or confused and your writing reflects this!'
ReplyDelete(Added by Ruby as lost when reposting)
You've nailed it there, Sue. As my friend John McKenna says, when a writer finds their vocie then they need to be careful about ongoing engagement with writing groups, real or virtual.
ReplyDeleteTo everything there is a season.
I was on Authonomy for a while and it was a complete waste of time. Asking writers to edit each other is like asking children to discipline each other. Tears will fall. Hissy fits will be had. Lower lips will tremble.
ReplyDeleteSusan, your comment made me think of Lord of the Flies. Not a bad comparison.
ReplyDeleteYou've summed it up nicely Ruby. Once you put your words out there - words you have labored over and hated sometimes but mostly loved - you subject yourself to all sorts of bad things we'd rather avoid. A sane observer may well question why anyone would choose this for a profession ; )
ReplyDelete@Natalie Indeed! We had an email sent round the asylum the other day - 'whoever took all the cutlery, please return it to the canteen'. To be a writer is to be a lunatic at times.
ReplyDeleteInteresting article Ruby (came to it via Multi-Story via Twitter). Several members of the Wordwatchers Writer's Group have ventured on to YouWriteOn with the first X thousand words of their novels, two of them won that very race you describe (Katherine Webb and, one year later, Charlotte Betts). What they actually won on YouWriteOn was exposure, that smidgen of luck that sometimes we all need, because the other thing that Katherine and Charlotte had in common was that their efforts uploaded to YouWriteOn were their 7th novels.
ReplyDeleteWordwatchers hold twice yearly short story competitions which we critique while the stories are still anonymous but discuss once we all know who wrote what. Real "whites of their eyes stuff" - it can be bruising, but always extremely useful.
Charlotte's 2nd novel is about to be published - her editor knew that we, as Wordwatchers, had also read and critiqued the draft and asked if we'd spotted the same issues that she had - to which the answer was... yes.
Sometimes a peer review is exactly what you need and if seven people you trust all tell you, to your face, your precious story is a dead duck, well, it is.
John (on behalf of Wordwatchers)
@Wordwatchers
www.wordwatchers.net
Ruby, perfect post. Oh where do I begin... I suffered, for a period of a couple of years, from a malady introduced by the attempt to keep up with the review chase on a certain "peer" site run by H-C that begins with an A. I finally found I was permanently mathematically challenged, so I left it, then struck out into academia for a while, then that became so hole-probing-oriented, to make use of your parable, I had to move on. I am happily, finally ensconced in an ancient community of writers established ages ago in the UK, which seems to actually be made for writers by writers who have nothing to gain by being A.H.s, but can provide lots of real help for the tight spots and no rocks, sticks or twigs in your way when the going gets good. The founder of the site once mentioned he was convinced that "either you have the ability to write, or you don't. It can't be taught, it can only be improved". I would add, or destroyed. Meanwhile, wrighting a lot helps.
ReplyDeleteI'm inclined to agree with your assessment. I've only been on the site for a whopping 2 months now and find the majority of the forums to be filled with scandal and intrigue. I can't imagine how this would be constructive to any party involved, especially considering how the majority of the time spent on the site seems to revolve around the puffing of chests and constant need to compare genital girth, however there are tiny islands within Authonomy that are populated by helpful and altruistic writers who want nothing more than to network and share insight. If one manages to stay away from the drama and acknowledge it with an objective lens, it quickly goes from being irritating to a fascinating real-time simulation of what would occur if a legislative assembly were to suddenly condone verbal abuse and made amphetamines a standard part of the common man's diet. The more recent development of the site's administrative staff also leans towards the absurd, where even if a book does have a certain degree of artistic merit, it is quickly shot down by whomever has reviewed the copy that lands on the editor's desk with a whimsical passage that routinely ends with, "This is a great book but we're not publishing it for reasons too vague to expand upon".
ReplyDeleteI'm not planning on taking the site too seriously, but it is a decent place if you'd like to receive a bit of an inflated ego to hold you aloft as you finish your rough.