Critique Checklist

This is a checklist I recently put together for the writers’ group I belong to. Suggestions are welcome

1. Things to Think About When Critiquing A Story

Intent

In any short story or chapter, the writer has specific goals, and you should be able to make some fairly accurate guesses about what those goals are.

Intent is the single most important issue in a critique. The writer knows (or should) what she wants to accomplish. Your job is to tell her whether she’s accomplishing it, and if not, how she might accomplish it. It’s almost always better to question a writer’s intent than it is to debate it. If you can’t determine the intent (or if the writer actually didn’t have specific goals), you can help by focusing the writer on the importance of intent.

What is the writer trying to accomplish? What is she trying to establish about her characters? What is she trying to advance in terms of plot developments? What emotions is she trying to convey? What is the target audience of the piece?

Was she successful? Are there specific things she could have done to be more successful?

Involvement

Did the writer maintain your interest throughout the piece? If you felt your level of interest decrease, try to think about what specifically caused it. Repetition of the same point? Gratuitous description? More detail than necessary?

What could the writer have done to keep your interest level high?

Tension/Conflict

A fiction writer’s most important job is to torture her characters. Conflict doesn’t need to be purely situational or external – it can be internal, psychological or moral too.

Was there tension and conflict in the piece? Try to identify the source of the tension – if you can’t, there’s a problem. How could the writer create more tension? Is the conflict too easy to resolve? Are the characters concerned about things that are truly important?

Voice

“Voice” is a vague idea in fiction writing, but it has a huge impact. It’s the flavor of the writing – the unique insights and perspective that the writer brings to the story. Writing without voice feels mechanical and flat.
Does the writer have a distinct voice? Does each character have a distinct feel? Can you easily tell the characters apart from their dialog?

What sorts of issues does the narrator focus on? Does the writer use metaphor? Are the metaphors fresh and lively? Is there a “mood” to the piece that comes through? Does the writer use cliché?

Voice is one of the toughest things to critique, and it’s usually something that the writer has to find for herself. But still – ask yourself what the writer might do to bring her own voice and perspective into the story.

Pacing

Pacing is the overall speed of events in a story and how that speed changes throughout the piece. It’s also the rate at which the reader is fed new information by the writer. Since uniformity bores us over time, good writing almost always has a varying pace.

Is the pace too slow? Do you find yourself wanting to skip ahead to what will happen next? Is the pace too fast? Do you feel like you have time to digest what happened? Do you lose track of things that happened earlier in the story? Do you know who a character is when they appear or are mentioned?

Does the pace change during the story? Does the writer slow down to dwell on important or emotional moments? Does the writer leave a mystery hanging long enough to keep you intrigued but not so long that you lose interest? What might the writer do to improve the pacing?

Magnification

Magnification is the level of detail in a story, and also the level of intimacy the narrator gives us with the characters. It’s related to pacing (since a high level of detail slows down the action), and like pacing it should vary throughout the story. In general, magnification should be higher when something important or meaningful is happening.

Does the writer describe events and settings in enough detail? Too much detail? Do you feel like you really “know” the characters? Did you feel like you were “there” while you were reading? Does the writer describe things at length that turn out not to be significant? Does the writer give “blow-by-blow” accounts of the characters’ movements? Does the level of magnification change during the piece – does the writer “zoom” in and out on the action in the story? What things could the writer do to make the magnification better?

Consistency and Realism

Characters have to act like real people, or readers will be unable to immerse themselves in the story. Characters also have to act “in character” – they have to act in a way that is true to who they are.

Are the characters’ actions outside of the range of likely human behavior? Consistent with the character’s experience or profession (e.g., a seasoned homicide detective that can’t look at corpses)? Consistent with previous behavior? Proportional to what’s happened (e.g. killing another character over a $20 bet)?

This seems to be one of the most contentious areas in any critique (writers tend to have strong feelings about their characters’ identities), so it’s important to have more than vague feelings that a character is acting unrealistically. If you think a character is acting unrealistically, try to point to the actual text if possible (e.g., “here the character acts in this way, but here he acts completely differently”).

Dialog

Dialog is hard to critique, because fictional dialog is not real-life dialog. But as readers, we usually have good intuitions about what sounds “natural” in a piece of fiction.

Does the dialog sound natural? Is the vocabulary suited to the character? Does the dialog reflect the character’s mood? Are there interruptions? Pauses? Incomplete thoughts? Does the way the characters speak to each other reflect their relationship? Is the dialog appropriate to the situation the character is in? Does the dialog sound good when it’s read aloud?

Description

Does the writer describe people with physical characteristics? Gestures? Actions? Do you feel like you can “see” the setting of each scene? Does the writer use multiple senses (smell, sound, touch) to describe things? Are the descriptions sometimes metaphorical? Do they convey mood? Do they set tone? Do the descriptions come from a particular perspective? Does the writer use small details to create a larger sense of setting or action? Are the descriptive sections too long? Short? What can the writer do to improve her descriptions?

Narrative Mechanics

What is the POV of the story? First-person? Third person? Does the POV work for you? What tense is the story told in? Is the tense consistent? Is the narrator omniscient? Limited? Does the narrator have her own separate voice in the story? Is that appropriate for what the writer is trying to do? Does the writer have specific reasons for choosing the POV, person, tense, etc.? Do those reasons serve the story? If the writer chooses unconventional mechanics, does the payoff of that choice outweigh the discomfort of the reader in adapting to it?

Genre

Does the piece fit within a particular genre? Are there specific expectations that the genre creates? Is the writer meeting those expectations? Subverting them? Are you a fan of the genre? If not, can you still relate to the piece as a story? If you are truly not a fan of the genre, and it gets in the way of evaluating the story, let the writer know and recuse yourself from the critique. Otherwise, your critique will end up sounding like a general critique of the genre.

2. Things to Remember When Giving a Critique

Imagine Being a Reader

Keep in mind that you are a writer in addition to being a reader. That means that your perspective is going to be different than most of the writer’s target audience. When thinking about the story, try to
occasionally imagine being a plain old reader.

How You Say It

How you put things during your critique is at least as important as what you say. If you tell a writer, “this chapter was boring”, she’s not going to listen to the rest of what you have to say. Beyond being rude, statements like that are also factually false, since what’s boring to one reader might be fascinating to another. That doesn’t mean you should say, “this chapter bored me” instead. Try to speak from your own perspective, cite specific parts of the text, and use non-judgemental language. In this case something like, “The description of the main character’s shoe on pages 10 through 46 felt a little long to me – I was wanting to find out what happened next” is going to be more effective.

If you feel like the above advice is politically correct bullshit, you should probably refrain from doing critiques at all. It has nothing to do with touchy-feelyness: people simply won’t listen to your advice if they feel attacked or judged as a person, and your critique will just raise the discomfort for everyone in the room.

Ask Questions

Your critique doesn’t have to be a monologue. It’s always appropriate to ask questions about the writer’s intent, and it’s often useful to ask about the particulars of characters, plot, etc. Quite often, the writer knows something about the character or story that needs to be put in the text.

Positivity

A critique is as much about what you liked as what you didn’t. It’s often a great idea to start and end your critique with things you liked. If you didn’t like anything at all, recuse yourself politely. In general, it’s okay to say things like, “I just don’t feel like I know enough about sci-fi to critique your story,” or “Experimental fiction just isn’t my cup of tea”.

Practicality

Remember that a critique should be practical. If you’re just saying, “I liked this” or “I didn’t like that”, it’s not going to be helpful. Always think about ways that the writer could change the things that are problems for you in the story. Be as specific as you can.

Let It Go

You might find yourself trying to persuade a writer that you’re right on a particular point. This is an important part of critique, but in the end, it’s the writer’s story to do with what she wants. Say it as clearly as you can, attempt to verify that the writer understands what you’re trying to convey, then let it go.

Golden Rule

When you think about what you’re going to say, imagine someone else saying the same thing to you in a critique. If it makes you wince, rephrase.

Firefly

This is a story I started a long time ago and am now afraid to finish. I think my mistake was taking it in to critique group too early

In the beginning they had two languages between them, her silence and his songs. He sang to hear himself, anything from Mockingbird to the Faerie Dance with invented words, and she seemed to imitate the world, in miniature vast and quiet, an infant earth. At midmorning he imitated her, silehntly hunting down an old path or finding a new one with her riding his back in a canvas sling. At midmorning he felt the necessity of stillness twenty yards before the profile of a deer with its head up, calm but alert, and then he felt he became part of everything, though he forgot this feeling easily and when he sang felt just as much in rebellion against everything. She was always part of everything, or was everything, and he hardly noticed her there, except for her slight weight on his shoulders, growing a little towards afternoon, and except when she peed and the pee trickled down his back, at which he laughed and said, You little bugger, thinking that she took it on herself to pee for him too, but on the wrong side, since it soaked the seat of his pants. Soon, as if she suddenly recognized him as part of the world, she began to imitate him, making little sounds, and he dropped the melody from his songs along with his rebellion, grateful for her admittance and thankful that she had begun to eat the apples he mashed up for her, since the goat milk he gave her seldom stayed down well and kept her thin. But even thin and even so early, he could tell that she would be beautiful, and maybe for this reason he never killed a doe with young.

Once words had been encompassed in her tiny planet his hunting suffered. She was given to yelling, Look! and pointing over his shoulder at the prey just after the draw but before the release, and she laughed with real joy as the deer sprang away. She loved to watch the deer run, and he could do nothing but laugh as well because he loved it too, though one deer was worth a month of supper and none was a month of apples and leeks or a winter month of nothing. Now you’ve frightened off my supper, he chided her. He was lately mindful of his grammar, having the strange impression that she listened intently to everything he said and that, though she understood not a word of it, she left it all in a pile in her mind to be sifted through later. She showed a remarkable preference for verbs over nouns, never using the word water, but always splash, and splashing him as he washed the clothes in the shallows of the stream. He would have preferred deeper water but was sure she’d crawl after him. Careful, careful, he always said when walking down a stony hill, because she was the world and he was just as necessary. For a while, he fed and protected the world, the one that was stoic in a warm bath and playful in a cold one, the one that liked only a single noun, one with a verb in it – firefly. All done, Firefly. With the laundry under one arm and her under another, he walked back to the house while she made a long low sound in which each of his steps could be heard.

Read the rest of this entry »

Doorways

©2011 david kilmer (all rights reserved)

This story was originally published in the Bellevue Literary Review in Spring (I think) 2006.

The knocking is almost frantic — if he were trying to speak to me in morse code, he’d be saying, “S. S. S. S. S. Don’t you get it, S!”

I try to get up from the chair. I can feel the rotten part of my brain tugging at the small of my back, the way a five-year-old girl will earnestly try to lift her mother off the ground. And the rest of my mind laughs at the rotten part, the way the mother might laugh if she were cruel. My body is heavy, suspended in thick, amniotic syrup, hearing my mental shouting only as a faint, muffled hum. The space between intention and action is impenetrable and deep.

“S. S. S. S.” It’s definitely a man. Men have beefy knocks, like soldiers searching a neighborhood for fugitives. And it must be a friend, because the landlord has his rent, and the guy who reads the meter has already been by this month. So — a male friend. I don’t have many of those, and only one who would try to beat my door down after waiting less than a minute for me to answer it.

I call out, “Michael” in my loudest voice, but it comes out as the sorry wheeze of someone who has just been punched in the gut. I can’t even scream in frustration. I try to relax. The levodopa has already carried me, shaking, as far as it can today; there’s no use asking any more of it. I try to embrace the role of the passive observer, counting off the silence between bouts of knocking. That’s how you can measure patience, I think — as a ratio of silence to knocking. The silences are shorter. It’s quantitative proof that Michael lacks even a basic working knowledge of patience. For a moment, I just feel sorry for him. He’s out of his depth with the Parkinsonian me. Or I’ve done too good a job these last few years hiding my disease from him.

Finally he gives up reciting his monosymbolic alphabet. In less than a minute, I hear the side window open, and then Michael cursing and grunting his way through it. He rushes into the living room, and when he sees me, I know he thinks I am dead. I don’t know how I know. There must be a way that people look at things that can’t look at them back. He stands there in shock, his eyes wide to maximize available light, and his mouth open to allow greater oxygen intake. His stance, arms up a little, legs apart and slightly bent, is reflexive and ancient, a prehistoric tale of conflicting drives. But there’s nothing here to fight or flee from. I close my eyes and open them again, and I flap my left arm in a hopeful parody of dyskinesia. See? I’m alive.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I tell him.

But he is flapping his arms as if to show me what dyskinesia is really about, and yelling, “Jesus Christ Meg there’s six days worth of newspapers on your doorstep have you been sitting here for six days I was about to break your door down why the hell didn’t you come to the door God I thought you were dead you scared the hell out of me.”

Read the rest of this entry »