As we’re yet again — third time is a charm, right — on the verge of starting a writers’ group, I was asked by a prospective member how to give a good critique (meaning a helpful one.)
I realized that I have tagged in my head many ways to give bad critiques, but I’ve never really tagged how to give good ones, even though I try to.
First, let me detail the ways you can go wrong, wen when you think you’re “helping.” (Or not. Sometimes your back brain knows exactly what you’re doing.) Starting from the worst to the least evil.
- Don’t give revenge critiques. I don’t care if someone gutted your story in invalid ways, and left it bleeding on the floor. This is a situation in which an eye for an eye will just leave everyone blind and eventually destroy the group.
- Don’t give a critique to show how smart you are. If you’re doing things like reaching back to the etymology of words and wondering if a parallel universe would have roses, you’ve gone too far. Trust the world building as you would if you were reading for pleasure. Most of these comments are designed for the reader to get one-up on the writer and or all of the rest of the group. It’s a “I’m so smart” thing. Yes, of course, if I’m writing an historical novel and mention a Freudian slip, that’s in your face and should be marked as ‘this is a word choice error because’ but short of that? Yes, you can use quixotic in a parallel world. How do you know they didn’t have a Quixote? And anyway, it won’t stop most readers. And don’t tell me I can’t use a Latin derivation word next to a Saxon derivation word. No one else cares. Figure out if you feel threatened by the writer or the group, and stop trying to prove yourself in critiques. Go write.
- Don’t say something just because the rest of the group has given its opinions and now you don’t have anything to say. Someone depends on you to tell them how to improve the story, not to give them false leads about something no one would ever care about.
A critique isn’t a copyedit. Unless the writer specifically asked for it or indicated he/she is okay with getting it, leave the words alone. Particularly leave word choice alone, until it completely popped out.
Years ago, I realized that people referred to “good writing” to mean grammatical and makes basic sense. That’s not good writing. It’s competent writing. And it’s not the most important thing in your critique. Unless it’s so bad you can’t understand it, it’s something that grammarly or a copyeditor takes care of. (I always recommend having a copyeditor before publication.
Now, how to give a good critique
- Before we start, if you’ve heard “if you could be discouraged, you should be? Forget it. Would you say it about any other profession? Doctors have a long and arduous training. Would you say “If you are very tired when you’re resident, you should quit?” Or “You made a mistake in diagnostic. Give up?” Who does that? Everyone can be discouraged, given a hard enough pounding. And many will be broken forever. “If you can be discouraged, you should be” was just license for editors, agents and older pros to be as mean as possible. It also assured the people who stayed were broken, beaten, and willing to take abuse at random from traditional publishing. This didn’t make the field healthy. Don’t critique to discourage. Just to improve.
- You’ve been told to start a critique with something good. Yes, like others I’ve found myself at times trying to figure out what to say, but yes, you should try that. There is usually at least one thing the writer is doing very well. Telling him/her that is not just a way to soften the blow if you’re going to have a lot of complaints. It’s a way to tell them: go this way. More like this. It’s the carrot, not the stick, and it works over time.
- The most important thing you can tell a fellow writer is “this is where I’d have stopped reading” and why. 90% of the time when I stop reading a book just bought or previewed from Amazon? It’s “I got confused” or “You contradicted yourself within a page.” Or alternately “I don’t know what I’m reading.”
- The second most important is to tell them why you’d have stopped reading. In no particular order and probably not exhaustive, these are the reasons I stop reading usually in the first three to four pages.
1- I don’t know what I’m reading. No, seriously. It will be something that sounds like a weather report, but it’s supposed to be a novel; or it sounds like an academic paper; or it’s three pages in, and there isn’t a character or a problem, just meandering prose jumping heads/subjects.
2 – You contradicted yourself in a very short space of time that even my ADD brain can’t ignore. Your character was short in the last paragraph and is now seven feet tall, and you didn’t tell me how that happened, and it’s not a fantasy or science fiction.
3- You’re giving information out of order. You told me this was taking place in a “Well furnished room” and on the second page, I find out it’s a throne room. Then I find it’s all burned out. Then I find we’re in Italy in the 17th century. Then….
4- Your words are so bad it goes well beyond copyeditting. I literally don’t now what you’re saying, and it might be written in Martian.
5- Why are you giving us 300 years of history of a world/kingdom that doesn’t exist before there’s a character, or I know why it matters? - The third most important bit is to identify things we don’t need in the story. “We don’t need to know how they manufacture widgets. It’s not germane to the story. Be aware if it’s a novel, you might not know if it’s needed or not.
- The fourth most important thing is to identify what needs to be there and when. “Your character named Kyle is a purple haired seven foot tall blue alien? Well…. shouldn’t we know that? And how he came to be on Earth.” Be aware though that sometimes you want to know things because you like the world or the character, and it’s not germane to the story. Also in novels, be careful of wanting the whole infodump upfront. That’s not how reading works, most of the time.
Besides that? Mark typos and grammar problems o the manuscript. Be kind and supportive. If you utterly hate someone in the group, find another group. And find it in yourself to root for other members of the group as you would for your own success.
Put your reader hat on, pretend it’s a book you bought, and tell the other how to improve it.
With malice towards none, and the kindness you’d wish to be shown.
*Of course, it posts right after I give up.*
Mad Genius Club 
27 responses to “How to Give Good Critique by Sarah A. Hoyt”
It’s WordPress. Sigh.
I find that if I stop reading early on, it is usually because I have seen no reason to care about the story. Either the characters are consistently described in ways that make them inherently unlikable, or there is no tension for page after page after page. I will read on further if my intent is to critique, but there is a limit.
Good advice. I haven’t done long-form critting for 12-15 years, and I wasn’t great at it back then. When I see snippets on Discord, I usually don’t feel like I have enough context to offer feedback beyond a friendly emoji, but will offer input if author has a specific question.
I think Steve Diamond described a critiquing process very much like that. Basically flag the ABCs: Awesome, Boring, and Confusing.
When Margret Ball went through my thing, one of the most useful critics she gave me was the parts where it was confusing.
There were some cases where the characters were being intentionally cryptic, and those mostly stayed in, but there were also spots where I was either popping between perspectives when I didn’t need to, or when I’d forgotten to explain enough of what was going on.
Cleaning those up, I think, really improved the stories, and let the areas where characters were intentionally hiding stuff be more visible as intentional actions, rather than lost in the general mayhem.
One of the few times I had a good writing group, they did most of the things you talked about. Especially grammar and “where I got lost” points in the story. I’ve read far too many stories where the gears shifts and they shifted badly and you wonder how you got there…
Thinking of “bad critiques”, one thing we have to remember is that the story is HIS/HER story.
When critiquing a story, we should avoid telling the author “how we would write his story” especially if we know something that would alter his story.
One author wrote a story where part of the backstory is that all magic users in England were hunted to death (except for the noble magic users who used their status to hide).
My problem was that in England, the cunning folk (magic-using commoners who were said to fight witches) survived because while juries believed they had magic, the juries thought the cunning folk were Good Guys.
In the Real World, the cunning folks were “defeated” by fraud laws. IE “So you claim to have magic, prove it and you can go free.” 😀
But I enjoyed that book and will purchase the follow-up novels.
Grumble Grumble
Too much talking (from me), but my point is that I could have been a terrible critiquer if I kept “nagging” him about the flaw in his story.
Oopsie. When I’ve beta read I’ve been too heavy on the grammar I bet. Because this seems to me to be great advice for beta readers, am I right?
Eh. Grammar is only important if it’s a total mess.
Look for systemic errors. (Be sure to consider whether it’s POV, too. Lots of sentence fragments may be a tight POV, though it could still be too choppy.)
For general consumption: remember that in criticizing grammar, you can be wrong.
I will draw particular attention to “passive voice” does not mean “nothing is happening” and “run-on sentence” does not mean “long.”
Nothing undermines confidence more quickly than “correcting” grammar wrong.
Good advice. I want to know where the story is boring, because boredom is a cardinal sin of writing. Causing it in readers, I mean. If the story is written for entertainment, and bleeping expletives is the reading public not screaming for good entertainment right now, then it darned well ought to be awesomely entertaining, engaging, and can’t-put-it-down good for the reader.
The awesome bits are good too, so the author know’s he’s on the right track. Confusing is debatable. If it’s brief and intended as part of the plot, all good. If it’s unclear parts of the plot itself, not so good. I leave red herrings here and there for the mystery bits of my zombie story. I’ve caught a few readers that way, and it was rather nice to show what was *really* going on later. A situationally unreliable narrator can be useful at times.
I really need to work on making better cliffhangers, though. I’ve only had a couple of irate readers so far that thought I’d killed off the main character…
I got my degree in Broadcast Studies (for my sins), and one of the classes was on how to build a video story. As an example, our professor had a *professionally purchased* video on how a crew referee was supposed to do their job. It was a hot mess, and the reason he had it was that the professional crew folk had reached out to him to make a new one because the old one was showing its age.
Sure, it had been made by film students at USC, but it showed all manner of basic errors. Not white-balanced or color-corrected to make clips match. Not always leveled. Conflict of motion (a crew team rowing one way and then an immediate clip of another team rowing a different direction. Are they going to crash?) Even out-of-focus shots.
And… that out of order information you mentioned. Specifically, they said that if a crew had a challenge to a ruling, they had to submit a certain amount of cash to an official. Then they cut to other things entirely, leaving the entire class wondering if this was official bribery! When they’d finally gotten back to the explanation, it was that the money was a bond to prevent frivolous challenges… but the intervening comments had nothing to do with the end of a race, or the rulings, or anything that would make it make sense.
This was an official training video. They’d been happily using it for years. And a bunch of beginning students could point out all the flaws, because they were obvious. D+. Got the job done, barely.
Makes me wonder if at least some of the flaws were deliberate. My anthropology labs, we always had things that didn’t belong. That was part of the challenge- find the things that weren’t human, identify, classify, and label everything, and defend your assertions.
Maybe the fact that it was intended to illuminate faults was forgotten at some point over the years?
Nope. This was the crew folks’ official training video. They had *no idea* of the flaws in it, and they had paid for it.
Our professor was not impressed, but neither was he surprised.
Right now, I’m working on a local author’s first essay into a full-length suspense novel – a substantive edit. He’s a retired lawyer, who based it on some personal experience. Everyone he has shown it to so far have said nothing but nice things, which was flattering but not the least helpful – but he (and his wife, particularly!) wanted an honest, professional opinion and paid me for it, too. I’ll have about ten pages of notes and suggestions – positive suggestions, for the most, and examples of how he should have “shown” rather than “told”. And noted some contradictions in description, from chapter to chapter, notes on plot and character development, plus suggestions to work out solutions. I’ve said, over and over again to him, that he doesn’t have to follow my advice to the letter, but if it inspires him to go in another direction – then it’s all good.
The story is about a C+ as it stands, but it has the potential to be a B+ or even an A-, and I told him so.
Don’t say something just because the rest of the group has given its opinions and now you don’t have anything to say.
A useful phrase for this is a cheery “everybody else got it covered!” and maybe something encouraging, a genuine complement.
“”Where did you stop reading?” is the one piece of information I really wanted when I was writing my first book.
If I didn’t gobble down the book, my review would include what page I finally stopped at, and why I gave up.
Stopping at page 100 because it is page 100 and then telling the poor author every place they didn’t follow The Rules, and counting up spelling/grammar mistakes, it isn’t really useful except as proof reading. Also extremely discouraging.
A good review, for me, is “I read the whole thing, you are AWESOME, when is the next one?!” or “I threw it at the wall when the nerd got the girl. And the monster’s girlfriend -doesn’t- leave him? What a crock of !@#%!!!!1!”
“Thank God its over! Too much kissing!” is another good review.
The first one is the one I want. Yes, I am completely awesome. Thanks for noticing, I’ll work hard to get more of your money.
The second one, that reviewer is not my target audience. He wants a Nora K.J. book, he does not want my book. But, he read all the way to the nerd getting the girl, his special pet hate. That’s a big win for me.
The ”too much kissing” guy, he’s also looking for something I’m not going to write, but he finished it even if there’s too much kissing. Both negative reviewers stayed engaged until I hit one of their buttons. That’s good. That tells me I’m getting the job done.
Also, pissing off the weenie who doesn’t believe a woman will stick by her man was fun.
My favorite review was “You did WHAT to the space alien?!” That was sweet. ~:D
If you read through regardless —
Focus on the big issues. At the very least, if the front half of the story and the second half don’t go together, all the typos are liable to be fixed by the time the writer makes one story.
Then, focus on the moderate sized ones. such as lack of foreshadowing.
Revise your critique if you were taking notes as you went. “This makes no sense” — three paragraphs — “Oh that’s what you meant” into “The first introduction of the jackalope was frustrating not mysterious and I wouldn’t have gotten to the explanation six pages later if I weren’t critiquign.”
Where does one *find* a writer’s group? I’ve seen people talk about them all over the internet, but there was always something untrustworthy about the people talking about them. They gave off the vibe that they were the group they wanted to be and were working to keep out any potential deplorables. Like myself. Sometimes I wonder if I am my own beta reader, since the story I’m finally putting on Vella has been something like 13 years’ worth of work, with me going years between edits and thus forgetting a lot of what I had written.
Where does one *find* a writer’s group? I’ve seen people talk about them all over the internet, but there was always something untrustworthy about the people talking about them.
My experience with the one writers’ group I was with helped me build a career. There were no published writers in it when we started. There were a few by the time it disbanded, and one of them was me.
Here’s MY “how I found it” story.
About forty years ago, I met a couple people who read the same kinds of SF and fantasy I read at the Waldenbooks at the mall in Fayetteville, NC, and we got to talking, and the guy from the Waldenbooks said they had a room at the back of the store where we could meet after hours to talk about writing.
So I started making the 116-mile round trip once a week (in spite of having a full-time job as a registered nurse), and got really serious about actually writing the damn book I’d been tinkering around with.
I have a little article on my personal site about how to know when to stay with an existing writer’s group, or when to flee.
But the thing is, I don’t know how well it worked for most of the other writers. We had fun, we read or work to each other, we had a firm “no assholes” rule, and removed people who gave hostile, negative critiques right then, and removed their addresses from our mailing list so they didn’t get invited back…
But now there’s online, and there are writing communities, and forums, and the whole meeting-in-person thing seems more to me now like it was an opportunity to have a pizza party once a week, and stay up late reading what we’d written to each other.
Looking back on it, I loved it. But I’m not sure it was crucial to getting published.
We started one — dear Lord — 30 years ago. We met another couple who wrote, and well…
Eventually there were ten of us, non published. And it worked. In five years we were all published. For me? it kept me on track. And reassured me my language was not Engrish. Since it was ESL I worried. Well, ETL but no one knows that.
We tried another one 15 years ago, and it imploded badly.
On the other hand online doesn’t work as well for accountability.
OR maybe I’m just so sad I like combining writing and a social life.
And, yeah… I DID kind of change my mind part-way through my response.
I got so much out of my experience with the writer’s group because in between the hospital job and taking care of my kids, I worked my ass off every free minute I had writing. The writer’s group gave me a set deadline for which I had to have something to read…
But was it the GROUP or the DEADLINE that got me through the first few novels, and let me know that I could really do this job?
I don’t know.
I know that for a lot of the folks who attended, the meeting was a chance to read a little something and get feedback, and give back, and talk with other people who all loved books… but most of the members didn’t write it consistently, and when they did write, they didn’t do it like their lives depended on it.
I did — because working in the ER, I’d seen what could happen to your life and your kids and everything in the world that mattered to you if you weren’t home to watch over the people you loved. The horror of that is still burned into my brain forty years later, and I found a way to work full time AND be a stay-at-home mom by writing.
WHY you want to do it is going to get you a lot farther than just the bare bones of HOW to do it.
I will disagree about “Does this HAVE to be there?” I suggest changing it to “What does this contribute by being here?”
As an example, I’ll point to ATCB’s =Merchant= world stories, which are full of detail about life, commerce, and law. These details bring the world to life and represent the sometimes conflicting interests of individuals. Without that background, the story would be flat and empty.
One of my personal prickly points is grammar. Grammar is how we take words, with their individual meanings, and build them into larger units of meaning. As such it should be a tool of the writer, for composing graceful prose, or abrupt prose, or whatever is needed at a particular point in the story. The grammar of English often gives many choices, and the alert writer will pick the most effective for the situation.
Obviously that’s not what I’m talking about. At least I think it’s obvious. Not layered description, etc, which I do too. BUT ….. like I came to a halt in an Egyptian mystery that decided to start with human evolution and fifty pages later I still dind’t know what the story was.
As for grammar: I typo like a mother, and am often a-grammatical. Or at least, if you try to not have sentence fragments or whatever you’re going to mess with the rhythm which is important in a first person story, for ex.
Grammar is cute, but most of the grammar hounds just want what they were taught in fourth grade.
And at any rate, I run it by a VERY competent proofreader before it goes u and advise the same for EVERYONE.
A relative clause three times longer than the main clause may be correct grammar, but it is most likely grammar ill-used. Modifiers that put fourteen words between the noun of the subject and the verb may result in correct grammar, but are likely to be poor grammar nonetheless.
You don’t do these things. At least not anywhere I’ve see. (There, I used a fragment.)
“You’ve been told to start a critique with something good. Yes, like others I’ve found myself at times trying to figure out what to say, but yes, you should try that. ”
Thank you.
Granting that I do very little beta reading, but I am always tagging things in a piece that I like as well as the stuff that maybe could use some work. Maybe it’s just little things but I want the writer to know that a) I really am reading it b) it isn’t total drek.
I’ve seen people complain about a beta reader trying to find something positive to say. I’ve even heard people who take delight in ripping a story to pieces and offering nothing positive. (nice way to get someone to quit before they can really get started.)
THIS. There’s always something good. I’ve found just “pushing on the good” and suggesting mild improvement and sometimes biting my tongue on the minor offenses improves mentees out of all recognition.