Critter Danger

By Dave King  |  March 21, 2023  | 

Critters!

From Critters, the 1986 New Line Cinema movie..

I tend to pay attention to serendipity.  So when I had two clients run into problems with well-meaning but misguided critiques within a week of each other, I figured I’d found my article for this month.

Of course, I edit for a living, so it’s hard for me to say anything about amateur editors without sounding a little self-serving.  I do appreciate the efforts and, generally, the skills that amateur critiquers – critters – bring to the table.  Professional editing is expensive, and not all writers are ready to make that kind of investment in their craft. I get that.

But . . .

Most amateur editors are writers themselves – writers trading editing back and forth is how critique groups work.  This means they have their own preferred ways of crafting a plot, their own pet set of techniques for creating character, their own sense of what makes a story work.  In trying to get your story to work, they often wind up telling you to write the story they would have written.

For instance (I’m using my clients as examples with their permission, by the way), one of the characters in one client’s work was a teenager who was raised by an incredibly abusive stepparent.  We’re talking routine physical torture and threatening to kill the teens’ friends and random innocent strangers in order to compel obedience.  The teenager spends much of the book fighting back despite the deep-seated psychological damage this upbringing left behind.  He’s not always successful.  He’s forced to keep key facts secret, even though the secrecy risks the lives of other characters.  His attempts to fight back lead to two more characters getting killed.  A poor decision leads to yet another character’s death.  He himself lashes out at one point and kills someone who’s hunting him.

Some of my client’s critters found all of this too dark.  One said the teenager’s “kill count was too high.”  Others found it despicable that he kept secrets despite the risk to his friends.  And, yes, judgements like these are a matter of taste.  Some people prefer a lighter book with less fraught characters, and that’s fine.

But that’s not the book my client was trying to write.  One of her main dramatic threads centered on the power struggle between the teenager and his stepfather.  Lightening up on the stepfather’s threats would have robbed that thread of its drama.  Keeping the father’s torture and coercion without having it twist the teenager’s personality would have been unrealistic.  The darkness was at the core of their relationship and of the teen’s struggle through the story.  My client couldn’t change it without writing a different sort of book.

A professional editor probably wouldn’t have made this mistake.  Over my four decades in the business, I’ve helped writers who had a lot of different approaches to storytelling, so I’m not locked into one in particular.  And that enables me – and other professional editors — to see the story a client is trying to write and help them to write it more effectively.

My other client ran into a problem that shows up with amateur and professional editors both – being told to tailor his story to fit the market.

I’ve written about the dangers of this approach before.  Briefly, when you make mechanical changes to your story just to please a given market, your story might superficially mimic other successful books, but it loses the spark that brings it to life.  The people who do write widely successful stories do so, I suspect, because these are the sorts of stories they love.  If you love something else, it’s better to have an offbeat, less mainstream but more authentic story than to have a paint-by-numbers production shaped by whatever’s popular at the moment.

My other client’s story centered on a woman who was up against a genetically engineered monster that (among other things) secreted pheromones that caused fear, then used the scent of fear to track their prey.  She was able to defeat the creature in part because she meditated to deal with some of her psychological problems.  This inward focus led her to be able to control her fear when crunch time came.  But in the interests of writing to the market, her critter wanted the author to move the character away from her internal life and make her more of a “steel-jawed Hollywood action hero.”

Again, not the book my client wanted to write.  And while there is a market for steeled-jawed action heroes, it is mostly filled up by the Marvel and DC comic universes, mostly written by people who love that kind of story.  My client’s book may have had a less obvious market, but its inward-leaning action hero also helps separate it from the pack and may make it more marketable in the end.

Whenever anyone tells you to change something about your precious manuscript, it’s probably going to raise your hackles, at least at first.  So how do you tell the difference between someone suggesting changes you need to make and someone just telling you to abandon your book and write something else?

Repetition is one thing to watch for.  If one critter objects to something, that might just be  personal preference.  If several tell you the same thing, then you should at least consider it.  It’s still possible you’re looking at groupthink, but it’s more likely they’re spotting something real.

But the real key is inspiration.  If the suggestions help you to see problems that you suspected were there but couldn’t pinpoint, if they leave you itching to start rewriting once the initial shock has passed, then you’ve got a good one.  Listen, dig in, and get to work.

So what are your horror stories about critters?  

[coffee]

Posted in ,

17 Comments

  1. Linguist on March 21, 2023 at 9:04 am

    My best critiques have generally come from friends who read avidly but have zero aspirations to become writers themselves. These people are very tuned in to what makes them excited about a book, and what makes them want to keep reading, and also so distracting it throws them out of the story. Generally I don’t even have them write comments– I just get them on the phone afterwards and let them talk. I pay attention to what they were excited about, or weren’t, and overall how the story was coming across. Sometimes there are questions (“Tell me what you thought about X”), but mostly, it’s just an incredibly useful ramble.

    By far the *worst* critiques have come from other writers, where it’s clear they’ve found a hammer and are looking for carrots and screws that they can pretend are nails. I’m sure it’s useful for their development to have a story to react against, but…

    What I really want most, at this point, is someone who’s going to read the novel and highlight the sections that feel amateurish, like not the sort of thing you’d find in a book that made it to print. The novel equivalent of recording yourself playing music so that you can tell what the rough patches are. But I have not found that reader yet. Sigh…



    • Dave King on March 21, 2023 at 10:15 am

      You’re right about non-writer friends. Essentially, they read your manuscript like readers. You’ve got to take what they say with some salt, since different readers have different tastes, of course. But they are less likely to have an agenda.

      Also, I like the music analogy.



    • Beth on March 22, 2023 at 12:24 pm

      A critiquer–whether also a writer or reader-only–who can give you an honest reaction to your story and how it made them feel is worth gold.



  2. Benjamin Brinks on March 21, 2023 at 9:20 am

    There’s a difference between “I don’t like that” and “I don’t think that’s working.” Better still, “I don’t think that’s working yet.”

    The best critiques I get suggest alternate approaches to a particular narrative problem. I may or may not go with a given suggestion, but at least it gets me thinking.

    Your client with the teen-tortured story has a pretty tough challenge. What keeps us reading when a story’s events are repellent? I wonder what approach you advised? And how did the client ultimately decide to handle that issue?



    • Dave King on March 21, 2023 at 10:35 am

      I can’t get into detail, of course — I promised I’d keep the details of my client’s story disguised. But I didn’t really suggest anything regarding the teen’s relationship to his stepfather. It is dark, but it is internally consistent and tightly woven into the fabric of the story. In fact, I think her handling of the drama is one of her strengths, despite the darkness.

      Her other main character, with whom the teen has a close relationship, is much lighter and more hopeful. This helps counterbalance the darkness, making it a feature of a single character rather than of her world as a whole.

      And, yes, another thing that editors need to do well is to explain problems in a way that helps the client see them and find a way to a solution. “This isn’t working” is rarely helpful.



  3. Ken Hughes on March 21, 2023 at 9:32 am

    “Critters”… yeah.

    You give two excellent examples, and they have the same conflict at heart: critters not accepting the writer’s own priority in making the story, whether it’s resisting the style or wanting a more market-minded spin on it. By rights, the best critiquing starts with a sense of what the story *is* trying to do, and looks for ways it can deliver that better. There’s a difference between saying “That’s too high a body count, because *ick*” and “There’s been a lot of violence in the same vein for a while. Could you get more impact after giving us a false rest, or if you hit us from a new direction?”

    Really it’s the same as any other kind of advice, or just dealing with people in general: try seeing more than your own perspective.



    • Dave King on March 21, 2023 at 10:38 am

      Exactly, Ken. I sometimes worry that the ability to project yourself into someone else’s head — to see things from a perspective other than your own — is becoming a dying art.

      I sometimes wonder how social media is affecting this ability. After all, on Facebook, you can associate only with friends you agree with you about everything. This is why I often seek out civil conversations with people who disagree with me. I need the perspective.



      • Ken Hughes on March 22, 2023 at 8:50 am

        A roomful of people shouting at each other is a lot of wasted brainpower. So’s a room full of people agreeing with each other.



  4. Erma Clare on March 21, 2023 at 9:58 am

    I read your post right after listening to a news show where a parade of people opined on a current issue. I think we, humans, are losing our ability to evaluate and inform to a need to opine as rewards too often go to those who opine the loudest. I had a problem with one of my critters similar to your clients, but the critter stopped after the third chapter because I said I didn’t want opinions on the story so much as the writing. Months later, the critter became angry to not have been acknowledged. I will be much more careful next time and also think AI may do a decent job (eventually, in a purpose-specific app) finding some things we want critters to find. Thank you for sharing your clients’ experiences and best to them!



    • Dave King on March 21, 2023 at 10:45 am

      See my response to Ken about where this tendency to opine may come from. Loud opinions garner more likes than considered, informative argument.

      I’m not sure about AI being able to edit well, and not only because it’s my job on the line. As I understand it, AI systems like Chat GPT construct their responses out of large databases of conversations. They are literally groupthink. So their responses may be responsive and plausible, but they will never be original and creative. The AI can literally not think outside the box.



      • Erma Clare on March 21, 2023 at 11:01 am

        Agree, AI can’t replace developmental editors.



  5. elizabethahavey on March 21, 2023 at 10:12 am

    Great advice. And I will remember it, thanks, Dave



  6. Susan Setteducato on March 21, 2023 at 10:36 am

    All of your examples resonate with me. I recently put opening pages into a workshop and had someone suggest I do more head-hopping and front-load the pages with backstory for the sake of clarity. Having been in critique groups where it took a few months to ferret out who to listen to and who to ignore, the alarm bells jangled here. I love your suggestions for separating useful from less-than-useful suggestions. Thank you for a great post!



    • Dave King on March 21, 2023 at 10:49 am

      Oh, dear.

      The thing that jumps out to me here is that no editor can say you need to frontload your opening pages with backstory for the sake of clarity without reading the entire manuscript. You need perspective on the arc as a whole, when the revelations come and why, to be able to judge what should be revealed at the beginning.

      This is why I’m also a little suspicious of critiquing services that offer to look at your first five pages or first chapter or something similar. You really can’t judge a book until you know where it’s going to end up.



      • mcm0704 on March 21, 2023 at 12:10 pm

        Totally agree about having to read an entire ms first before offering a critique or editing suggestions. And I cringed when reading Susan’s comment about being told to frontload her story. That need to “set up” a story or character may feel right, but some really good stories just start and let the reader discover all the things that aren’t said right off. I always think of that great opening scene in “The Terminator” when this strange creature appears in the middle of a busy street. I first saw it when I was working with a film director who made me watch the video to see how action could just start in a film/or any story and the questions of what and why would keep people engaged. At the time, I kept throwing out questions to Stephen and he just told me to wait and watch. That was many moons ago, but the lesson I learned has stayed with me, and I use it often with editing clients, and in my own writing.



        • Dave King on March 21, 2023 at 12:40 pm

          This is actually an excellent example of the way different tastes can influence your critters. Some readers are happy to accept that they won’t understand everything that’s happing right from the start. For that matter, a lot of spy thrillers leave readers guessing what’s happening until the very end.

          Other readers feel manipulated when the author leaves them dangling. Neither one is right, it’s simply a matter of preference.

          I wrote a piece on this topic a few years ago, if you’d like to go into more detail.

          https://staging-writerunboxed.kinsta.cloud/2018/09/18/wait-what/



      • Susan Setteducato on March 21, 2023 at 12:43 pm

        To clarify, the critter was a fellow writer, not an editor. It was a page-swap in a FB group, writers at all different levels participating. Kind of a nightmare. The experience informed my choice to pay for the services of a professional Editor.