“But Valerie,” you say, “I never thought you did. Shub-Niggurath is an imaginary cosmic horror invented by a racist white dude. Why would you think you need to clarify that?”

Well, dear reader, we don’t know for sure that the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young isn’t real; have some respect, just in case. But more to the point, writers often run into a little problem called verisimilitude: the appearance of something being true or real.

Most of the time, it’s a feature and not a bug. You want your writing to feel believable, realistic, as close to true as fiction can get. The lie that tells the truth, as the saying goes. However, sometimes that means you’ll end up convincing people the things you’re writing about really happened to you.

And sometimes they have. Sort of. Call it the truth that tells a lie.

To get that tasty verisimilitude, writers pull details from their own lives and tweak them. The sweet old ladies wandering my neighborhood with their umbrellas and pamphlets become acolytes proselytizing for an ancient evil. I take the processed fake sugar center of my story and cover it in an organic handmade coating of stuff that actually exists and is familiar to me, so I can write about it from a place of personal experience. The real bits make the made-up ones easier to swallow.

Unfortunately, this means my friends and family will occasionally worry that I’m talking about them to the whole universe. Sharing Dark Family Secrets or Cherished Childhood Memories for my own nefarious reasons. They’ll recognize something I’ve written about and think, “That’s not how I remember it, what a jerk!” Or they’ll see a story or poem about something awful, brutal, sad, and worry that it happened to me. Worry that the emotions I’m conveying through the characters are ones I was experiencing at the moment I was writing them down.

Sometimes they are. Sort of. But remember that writers are liars, and unlike most lies people feed you, ours have been reworked repeatedly before you see them.

It can be hard to tell which parts of an artwork are the bespoke artisanal coating and which ones are high fructose syrup center. It’s one thing to reasonably assume JK Rowling has never cast spells with wands, or that Narnia isn’t a place you can visit through your closet, or that there are no black monoliths waiting for us on the moon or around Jupiter. (They’re on Pluto, obviously.) It’s another thing to wonder whether that character’s dad is my dad, whether their annoying boss is my boss, whether their depression and anxiety are mine, and so on.

With speculative fiction, the true-ish details usually help ground the fantastic elements, to suspend the reader’s disbelief so they don’t spit out the candy I’m peddling. My time working in a movie theater helped me paint a convincing picture of a man trapped in an endless soul-sucking loop of cleaning up popcorn and spilled soda. Watching my dad lie on a hospital bed in a coma for weeks became one of my characters doing the same in the medical bay of a spaceship. The pain of childbirth became a kidney punch or a wound from a sword. Locations, events, people, feelings… Anything can make it into a story or poem, with varying degrees of similarity to the subjective truth that passes for life experience.

They’re all ingredients. A pinch of how my mom talks, a dash of that cafe I had lunch in, a spoonful of my wry laughter when my son tells a truly awful knock-knock joke. Put them together and you get something that may be completely different from the source, but still tastes like delicious candy.

Maybe don’t take any candy from those ladies wandering around outside with the pamphlets and umbrellas, though. Just to be safe.

Ah, the dreaded query letter. The bait you lay gently on top of some leaves covering the enormous pit that is your novel, in the hopes that an agent will wander over and fall in and decide that it’s actually a pretty nice pit, now that they’re here. But which kind of bait is most effective? How much should you use? How can you get the agent to take YOUR bait instead of that other person’s over there?

(I recommend roasting a whole pig in the pit, but that’s just the Cuban part of me talking. Mmm, lechon.)

The wilds of the internet are full of sage advice about how to write a query letter, so I won’t throw in my two cents except to say that I think nailing the voice worked for me. Without further ado, here’s what I sent to my agent when I was querying CHILLING EFFECT.

#

In space, no one can hear you cagando en la mierda.

Captain Eva Innocente and the crew of La Sirena Negra cruise the galaxy delivering small cargo for smaller profits. When her sister Mari is kidnapped by The Fridge, a shadowy agency that holds people hostage in cryostasis, Eva struggles through one unpleasant, dangerous mission after another to pay the ransom debt. To make things worse, she’s stuck with a hold full of psychic cats, a fish-faced emperor wants her dead for rejecting his advances, and her ship’s sweet engineer is giving her a pesky case of feelings. Qué jodienda.

Chilling Effect, humorous science fiction that parodies pop culture and video games, is complete at 115,000 words but has series potential. My fiction is published in Nightmare Magazine and She Walks in Shadows, and I am a graduate of the Viable Paradise workshop.

#

I opened with a personal note, but some folks will counsel you to put that at the end rather than the beginning. I also mentioned that the agent had liked my #DVPit pitch, and reproduced that pitch so she’d remember it.

Hope this helps, and good luck with your bait and pit-digging!

This is a repost from my old blog, with updates where they felt necessary. Hope it helps!

#

“You are insufficiently white and fluffy!” you scream at a passing cloud. The cloud pays you no mind. It is secure in its cloudness and has no interest in your opinions, but more importantly, your critique was not a very good one.

“But Valerie,” you ask, “what should I do instead, I who am insecure in my critiquing abilities but eager to develop them further on my path to writing the BEST THING EVER?!”

The simplest method I’ve encountered so far came from an Odyssey workshop taught by CC Finlay. Behold, the four-part critique process.

1) Summarize what you read.
2) Say at least one thing it did well.
3) Say at least one thing it did poorly.
4) Offer at least one suggestion to fix it.

Step 1: Summarize what you read. A couple of sentences suffices, and ideally you want to touch on any theme or subtext you noticed.

Example: “This story is about a puppy who goes on an epic journey to find the Slipper of Superpowers, but his best friend finds the slipper instead and in a jealous rage he becomes a supervillain and vows revenge. It’s an allegory for the inherently self-destructive nature of capitalism, the literal representation of a dog eat dog world.”

Why do this: If the story you read and the story the writer thought they wrote don’t match up, then either the writer needs to figure out where they went wrong, or you didn’t do a great job of reading. Possibly both! But it’s important to know up front that something is amiss.

Step 2: Discuss at least one thing you thought the story did well. Maybe the characters were fully fleshed out, or the imagery was vibrant, or the language took your breath away. Think about stuff like character, plot, setting, language, etc.

Example: “I thought the dialogue was clever and felt true to the experience of puppyness. I laughed out loud at the jokes about eating cat poop.”

Why do this: It’s good for writers to know when they’ve done something right, so they can keep doing it. We all want to fix our flaws, but it’s important to maintain our strengths as well. It also helps cushion the blow for the next bit.

Step 3: Discuss at least one thing you thought the story didn’t do well.

Example: “I thought the setting of the story was poorly described. I wasn’t really sure where they were at any given time. A castle? A cave? They were just sort of walking through blank spaces. Where did all the cat poop even come from?”

Why do this: Regardless of whether you tell a writer HOW to fix something, it’s good for them to know that a reader stumbled over a certain part, or couldn’t suspend disbelief, or found a particular character excessively gross. Just because I can’t fix a car myself doesn’t mean I can’t identify that it’s making a weird noise and smoke is billowing out from under the hood PULL OVER WHAT ARE YOU DOING STOP THE CAR.

Step 4: Offer at least one suggestion for how to improve the work. Yes, I know what I said in step 3, but this is a different step, okay?

Example: “I would give more detail about the setting, maybe show us how they’re going through this maze of catacombs, which is why they keep finding cat poop (CATacombs, get it???).”

Why do this: While the writer is never under any obligation to use your suggestions, it can be helpful to see how other people would fix a problem. Maybe you have exactly the right solution. Maybe your solution helps point the writer in the direction of the right solution. And maybe your solution shows the writer what the obvious answer is, so they can go in an entirely different and more satisfying direction.

So, one more time, the steps to a useful critique:

1) Summarize what you read.
2) Say at least one thing it did well.
3) Say at least one thing it did poorly.
4) Offer at least one suggestion to fix it.

While I tailored this to stories, it can apply to poetry just as easily. These are not required for any and all critiques offered here, but it’s a good template to start with.

“But Valerie,” you say, “I’m not sure the above is enough, and it’s not super useful for line editing. Got any other ideas?”

Another simple method by way of Mary Robinette Kowal: the ABCD method. It works overall, but is also good for figuring out which bits you should call attention to as you’re reading.

Look for four things: Awesome, Bored, Confused, Disbelief. If something is great, say so. If there’s a place in the story where you find you’re getting bored, point it out. If something confuses you, ask about it. If some part strains credulity, note it.

The two methods mix and match together pretty well. Step 2 covers the awesome things, while step 3 lets you talk about the boring, confusing or unbelievable stuff.

Additionally, going further to describe WHY you feel bored, confused, etc. will help both the writer and you. The writer, because they can see into your thought process as you read, which gets them out of their own head to consider stuff from an alternate perspective. You, because the more you think about the how and why of other people’s work, the better you’re likely to be at doing the same for your own.

Personally, I like to do a minimum of two reads of any story. For the first read, I approach it like, well, a reader! I let myself sink in and enjoy what I can and be surprised by things. Then I do a second reading, armed with the knowledge I gained from the first one, and use that to find elements I missed from the first read, while hopefully better analyzing what works and what doesn’t. First reads are good for surface impressions and immediate reactions, but second reads are vital for more nuanced analysis.

Now go forth, and explain to some clouds how you enjoy their sun-hiding properties, but perhaps they could be a little less rainy.

I used to play D&D about a decade ago. Other times, too, but that was the longest-running game I played in, DMed by a friend who came up with some of the most amazing characters and adventures I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing. Heroes turned villains! Zombie apocalypse caused by our own hubris! Alternate reality versions of ourselves! It was truly epic.

The best part was, we played every Sunday. It was this magical anchor for the rest of the week, a thing I could look forward to and plan for and daydream about. We’d make food and shoot the shit for a little while, then dive in and play for hours, from the afternoon well into the evening, and sometimes later.

For my friend, of course, it was a constant rolling deadline, pulling together the threads of what we had already done and what he was gently nudging us to do while leaving extra thread for whatever we actually did end up doing. Then it was hour after hour of performing, playing different characters and listening to our bickering and tolerating our endless tactical scheming instead of just shouting, “HIT IT with a SWORD already!”

It’s not so different from writing a novel, though I’m never in danger of losing my voice from too much talking. Unless you’re Moorcock, it can take months or years to draft an entire book. You have these characters and plots floating around in your head, and periodically you sit down and let them bicker and scheme until it’s time to do whatever else life demands–eat, sleep, work, parent, etc.

Sometimes the characters hit things with swords, and that is pretty great.

Now that I don’t play D&D on Sundays, I write. Every week, I go to the same place with (more or less) the same people, and for a few blissful hours we put our butts in chairs and make words happen. When you don’t have external deadlines–when there isn’t a room full of your friends waiting for you to make magic every week, same Bat time, same Bat channel–it’s easier to let things slide. Having a firm date with myself gives me enough friction to keep the slide under control.

I also like to use NaNoWriMo in November and its brethren Camp NaNoWriMo events in April and July to get work done. Being a part of that community of writers three times a year gives me an additional set of deadlines, even if they’re still largely self-imposed. The structure of it helps me focus when it would be easier to procrastinate or let other life needs take priority. And there will always be something vying for the little time I have for myself.

My approach won’t work for everyone, but it works for me, for now. My novel comes together one Sunday at a time, just like that D&D game did. And someday, hopefully I can share its magic with everyone else.

Swords definitely included.