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Thinking about stories
Oct. 16th, 2011 11:12 amTrying to work out a few things in my head.
Before the past week, I hadn't really gone through a critique process in a while. Like, possibly years. But I've been slushing for Ideomancer for over two years now. Coming back to critiquing felt odd and yet familiar.
Critiquing, my process was very similar to how I slush. Read it once, go away for a while and think about something else, come back to it and write my response (rejection/rewrite/pass up letter, critique). It gives me time to see if it lingers in my mind, what aspects of it linger in my mind, and then I come back to it and look into the nitty-gritty aspects before writing up the response.
What critiquing did was give me a reason to write down everything that I saw. When I'm writing rejection letters, I pick out the biggest reason that I am not passing up the story and the biggest thing I liked about it, and there's the personalized rejection. It's not a list of everything good and everything bad about the story. It can't be. I couldn't do that, I don't have the time.
But critiquing--there you give everything you saw and thought about, you list all the problems from big to small and also the tiny things you vicariously enjoyed. So this past week, I consciously thought about every single thing about the story and then I wrote those things down. (Instead of registering most of them unconsciously.) It helped me see my own process from the outside, and that helped me think about slushing and about my own writing differently. Still trying to figure out what that "differently" is, but it's now there for me to consider.
Before the past week, I hadn't really gone through a critique process in a while. Like, possibly years. But I've been slushing for Ideomancer for over two years now. Coming back to critiquing felt odd and yet familiar.
Critiquing, my process was very similar to how I slush. Read it once, go away for a while and think about something else, come back to it and write my response (rejection/rewrite/pass up letter, critique). It gives me time to see if it lingers in my mind, what aspects of it linger in my mind, and then I come back to it and look into the nitty-gritty aspects before writing up the response.
What critiquing did was give me a reason to write down everything that I saw. When I'm writing rejection letters, I pick out the biggest reason that I am not passing up the story and the biggest thing I liked about it, and there's the personalized rejection. It's not a list of everything good and everything bad about the story. It can't be. I couldn't do that, I don't have the time.
But critiquing--there you give everything you saw and thought about, you list all the problems from big to small and also the tiny things you vicariously enjoyed. So this past week, I consciously thought about every single thing about the story and then I wrote those things down. (Instead of registering most of them unconsciously.) It helped me see my own process from the outside, and that helped me think about slushing and about my own writing differently. Still trying to figure out what that "differently" is, but it's now there for me to consider.
