Critiquing Omniscient Viewpoint

One of the pitfalls of writing in omniscient viewpoint is that it can be very hard to get a critique.  If you run into a piece written in omniscient viewpoint, these are some things to remember:

Critique the work.  Okay, this sounds obvious, but people can get so focused on the use of the viewpoint they don’t do any actual critiquing.

If you’re not sure about how to critique omniscient, these are some things to look for:

• Distance:  It’s a natural part of omniscient viewpoint.  But there are different levels, and the writer may not be aware they’re hitting the wrong level.   Give specifics where you can. 
• Telling.  Omniscient has a telling component–A challenge when we’re all told “Show not tell.”  Be alert for where it might be too much, but don’t instantly codemn it because it is telling.
• Viewpoint switches.  Just look for places where it’s jarring and confuses you.

The rest of the critiquing is basic.  Do whatever you would normally do for any story in your genre.

 Avoid Lecturing.   A writer asking for a crit may receive multiple lectures admonishing them not to use the viewpoint like “You’ll never get published with omniscient.”  It might just be me, but this veers awfully close to “This work is garbage.  You’ll never get published.” 

Avoid Fixing.  Critters often rush into an omni critique and explain how to convert it to third, as if it was broken and needed to be fixed.  That comes across as condescending and insulting, rather than helpful.

Be Respectful of the Writer’s Reasons.  When I stated my reasons, critters pooh-pooed them away as if I didn’t really understand what I was doing.  Granted, there are writers who pick omniscient because they haven’t figured out who they want the viewpoint character to be.  But there’s a huge difference between “I wanted to show what all the characters were thinking” and “The distance of the viewpoint works best with the type of humor in the story.”

But the biggest thing?  Crit as you would want to be critted.

Benefits of Doing Critiques

Everyone’s first thought when they jump into the world of critiques is about getting their work critiqued.  Maybe they want to know the story is good or have someone identify what phrase in the first chapter is getting rejected (flashback to writer giving me a critique and saying, “Agents hate writerly words and will reject your story based on that.”  The word was edged).

But critiquing someone else’s work has its benefits.  Far more, in fact, that receiving one. 

Screech.  Slam to a halt.

More than receiving a critique?

Yup. 

Sometimes we have blinders on when it comes to our work.  The problem is as plain as the cars on the street, but we keep looking past it because we know the story and we want it to be a certain way.

Critiquing someone else’s work takes the focus off our story and puts it on someone else’s.   We see something that doesn’t work and ask why to try to help the writer.  It’s that act of asking why that brings us back to a different perspective with our own stories.  Now that we’ve seen the problem elsewhere, it’s possible to see it in our own work.  Once it’s identified, then it’s possible to come up with solutions.

I think I’ve learned more about my writing from critiquing other people’s work than anything else.  I’ve seen a lot of things that haven’t worked and have tried to understand why.   When I first discovered that I was repeating things too much, I critted for it.  I plowed through first chapters, looking for all manner of them, and that’s translated into me writing far fewer repetitions.  Still catch them, but it’s not like when I first discovered it and found the same thing said twice in the same paragraph.

So go out and do a few hundred critiques. 

—

It was seven last night.  Seven!  In California where I have some family, it’s eighty.  They have the air conditioner on.

Being Helpful in a Critique

We’ve all seen critiques that say something like “Great story!”  It’s not helpful because it only gives vague information.  Thinking about why helps not only the writer being critiqued, but also the person giving the critique. 

Example of unhelpful critique: “Rewrite this sentence.”

That doesn’t tell us anything about what bothered the critiquer about the sentence.  Maybe the sentence looks all right and doesn’t have any grammatical errors, so instead of being helpful, the comment is just too vague.

Examples of being more specific:

• This sentence was used two paragraphs above.
• Your character just walked through the wall.
• Check your facts–I think this may be incorrect.

What Not to Do When Receiving Critiques

Learning how to receive critiques is as much as a skill as giving them.  It’s not easy.  These are some things that are likely end future critiques from people:

Getting defensive or hostile.  No one likes spending time doing a critique and then getting a nasty response.  It always seems like the ones who do this the most often are also the ones with manuscripts that need a LOT of work.

Trying to explain away a problem.  If it has to be explained, the story needs to be fixed.  The author is not going to be there to say to the agent, “This is what this means.”

Vindictive critiquing.  The author receives a critique that he doesn’t agree with.  When the critiquer’s work comes up, the author gives a nasty critique to get revenge.  I had this done to me, and all I said was that there were too many character names in the chapter!

Just doing the easy stuff.  Author posts a chapter online and receives several critiques.  Author immediately reposts the chapter, correcting minor issues (i.e., typos, changing a character name, etc.), ignoring the bigger issues everyone commented on. 

Bringing Back the Same Mistakes.  An author submits a chapter that receives multiple comments for a specific issue.  Future submissions eagerly submitted by the writer continue to have exactly the same issue, giving the impression he really doesn’t want a critique.

It’s important to remember that people are taking time from their busy schedules to critique your work.  Even if you don’t agree with the critique, it’s important to at least make the critiquer feel like they didn’t just waste their time.

How to Critique When You Don’t Know How

Critiquing a story for the first time is a tricky thing.  It’s easy to go overboard in either direction and end up with a comment like “This is great!” or telling people “Don’t use adverbs!”

I learned how in Toastmasters.  We had to evaluate speeches, and our club’s practice was to start with three good things about a speech and then one thing that “needed improvement” (though it could be more than one thing; they told that to people doing it for the first time).

So the first thing in doing a critique is finding a submission that you actually like.  Online forums are nice because you can pick what you want to critique.  In Toastmasters, I once had to evaluate a speech where the speaker related a Darwin Award story he’d heard.  It was the kind of story that only a very small crowd would find funny (it involved impalement), and it was clearly inappropriate for his audience.  I couldn’t pick the speech, and it was a very tough evaluation for me.

So use online forums as an opportunity to go with your strengths.  Find your genre, find something that you enjoy.  Then pick three things that you liked and explain why you liked them.  Not “This is great,” but “The chemistry between the two characters made this a fun read.”  Be specific, rather than vague.  That’s helpful both to the writer receiving the critique, and also to you, because you’re thinking about why you liked it.  You may even want to highlight specific passages that support what you like.

If you feel comfortable with it, identify one thing that might be improved.  When I did the Toastmaster evaluations, it took me a while to work into this one.  When I finally started talking about improvements, I stuck to what I knew–grammar and facts (I always caught runon sentences in speeches).

It gets easier with practice.

Best and Worst Writing Advice

Worst Writing Advice

“Narrative tells the story.  Get rid of all your dialogue.”

This came from a critique I received.  Sometimes, with critiques, I have to read into them a little to get why the person is making the comment.  In this case, the individual read only non-fiction, and his one recent fiction experience was Cold Mountain.  If you haven’t read Cold Mountain, the dialogue is conveyed with dashes, not quotation marks.  It made me feel like the characters were communicating telepathically!

Best Writing Advice

“Write only the stories you can write.” 

– From the book Write Faster, Write Better by David Fryxell.  I probably could have read this book several years ago and passed the above right by without thinking about it.  But it was what I needed when I found it.  I’d been trying to show an important aspect of the story by including a crime, the murder of a celebrity.  But crime isn’t me; I just can’t write anything even tied to crime, and this made me realize I’d gone in the wrong direction.