Peek a Boo

I've been doing some critiquing for an on-line critique group I belong to, and this story is about to make me pull out my hair. It looks like a rough draft; incorrect punctuation, strange sentence construction, incorrect use of pronouns, wandering verb tense ... The list goes on and on. To my mind, this story isn't ready for a critique.
I understand that sometimes people want to get someone's opinion about whether a story idea is viable. Fine. Get a friend to read it for a general impression. But don't waste the time of a critiquer on a rough draft.
In my mind, a critique will point out blunders you haven't noticed as you've tried to craft this story, and some of those blunders might be huge, while others are really tiny. But when you send out something with lots and lots of grammatical errors that you couldn't be bothered to fix, you are wasting their time, as they attempt to find a tactful way to tell you to clean up your manuscript. You have to clean up all those punctuation and verb tense problems anyway, so why not look like you are at least trying to do a professional job?
Like all those other writers who are taking the time to critique your work for you, I would really rather spend that extra 5 or 10 minutes working on my own story. I don't mind helping a fellow writer, if that writer seems willing to do a re-write by hunting down and correcting what mistakes he/she can find without my help. Think of it as a quest to turn out a perfect manuscript. If you can do that much for a critiquer, you are that much closer to having a manuscript that's ready to be seen by an editor.
My husband has joined me on vacation, so now it's two of us cramming blog posts into our occasional visits to the local bookstore with free wifi. Still, it wasn't bad this time. See ya next week.
Trudy

Do Your Homework

Sunday night, I finished a 2-day road trip from H***. I didn’t have any car troubles (except nearly running out of gas after dark in the wilds of Mississippi), but a trip that I expected to take 24 hours over two days took more like 30. Why? Lack of planning, although I had convinced myself I had things well in hand, before I actually left home.

Back when my family was driving to Orlando for our vacations, we had a ‘regular’ route. But in February, I wasn’t sure I trusted the weather in those Kentucky mountains, so I picked a ‘southern route’, to get out of the snow as fast as I could. What I didn’t notice, as I planned this route, was that the road that took me into Birmingham AL never came out again, and never connected to the road I wanted to take out of Birmingham. And just because a road is shown on the map as a divided highway doesn’t make it ‘limited access’, nor does it guarantee a consistent speed limit. I have taken so many vacations sticking to Interstate highways, I had forgotten these very basic things. Hence, the southern route that had looked so promising took a lot longer to make it work.

What does this have to do with writing? It reminds me of a basic tenant of writing that I didn’t understand for a long time … do your research.

I write fiction. I don’t actually have to research anything, do I? It’s all a matter of my imagination, right? Well, yes and no. I decide the route I take, but if I expect a character to, oh, say, commit murder, then I’d better make sure there’s a connection between what comes before that drives that person to murder and whatever actions he/she takes after the murder. And will the plot be an interstate, with very few options to veer off course, or only a highway, with plenty of opportunities to take a wrong turn or get caught in a slow zone?

Do your research. And when you think you’ve got things all planned out, take another look.

Now to find some wi-fi to get this posted. Assuming I can do that, I’ll see ya next week.
Trudy