Category Archives: Writing Aids

Milieu, Ambiance, and Writing

Are milieu and ambiance important, perhaps even necessary, for the act of writing?

Milieu means surroundings, environment. Ambiance means the mood created by an environment. As a writer, you strive for a creative, productive mood, particularly one that results in a string of words soon to become a best-seller. Before sitting down to write, do you arrange a milieu conducive to achieving that ambiance? Let’s examine the aspects involved.

Sight

You don’t gaze at the screen or page all the time. Now and then you glance up. When you do, what visual surroundings do you prefer to see? Do you lean toward a natural view—vistas of the outside world including trees, flowers, mountains, lakes, etc.? Or are you the decorative indoor type—furnishing your writing space with paintings, knick-knacks, posters, figurines, or other delights for the eye? Perhaps visual clutter distracts you, and you seek a bare, spartan environment. Or do your visual surroundings matter at all?

Sound

Does noise, or its absence, harmonize with your writing? Some writers hate sound of any kind. Even the ticking of a clock or the hum of a fan disturbs them. Others prefer the quiet murmurs of nature—twittering birds and babbling creeks. Others put on recorded music, a background soundtrack of their writing passion. Perhaps, for them, certain songs match the rhythm of their creativity. Other writers tap into music more in tune with the specific mood or setting of their work-in-progress.

Smell

Scientists claim a strong link exists between odor and mood. Do you follow your nose to improved creativity or prolificness, or both? Do you achieve your optimum olfactory atmosphere via flowers, perfume, potpourri, or incense? Perhaps you turn your nose up at fragrances altogether, not caring one whiff about them.

Touch

Does the tactile sense reach out and poke your creative nerves? Does it help to stroke the fur of a pet or stuffed animal? Is the comfiness of your chair a factor? Maybe the feel of a pen in your hand rubs you the right way.

Taste

Bundled with smell, taste hits the spot for some writers. We’ve all heard accounts of authors who required alcohol to write, but I’m not sure I swallow that. In fact, I’d caution against forming a strong association between writing and tastes. Once that mental link gets established, you’ll strive to write better by eating or drinking more. Too much food or drink can harm your health.

Locale

For the above sensory factors, locale plays a role. Do you write outdoors, preferring a natural setting, disdaining the artificial? Or is the indoor milieu more your style, a place you can shape and adjust as you please, without the bother of insects?

Mental State

We’ve been assuming a process of ambiance—allowing the milieu to create a mood. Perhaps, however, you attain your optimum mental state in a more direct, way. Maybe you reach your creative mood through meditation. Or, more simply, you read and think about what you’ve written before to put yourself in the right frame of mind to continue on. In other words (with apologies to Decartes), you think, therefore you can write.

Experimentation

Maybe you haven’t a clue about the answers to any questions I’ve asked, but you’d like to find out. No problem. Do what a scientist would do—experiment. Try out different milieu and assess the resulting ambiance. Compare the way you write in these different environments. You’re not looking for surroundings that you find most pleasurable, but the one that results in your best prose. Readers, of course, may differ from your assessment and then you’ll face an interesting choice—go with what you prefer, or with what your audience wants.

As for me…

Throughout this post, I’ve proposed things for you to consider as you write. You might be interested in my choice of milieu and its ensuing ambiance. Why you’d be interested in that is a question only you can answer.

I favor the make-your-own-mental-state approach without regard to any milieu. I like to think I can write anywhere. However, if I should, one day, discover just the right environment to generate a best-seller, that would lock in that particular milieu and ambiance for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 3, 2024Permalink

An Outline Every Writer Can Love

Ah, outlines. Some writers love ’em. Others despise ’em. In which camp do you pitch your tent?

Dilemma

In general, plotters love outlines. Plotters plan before writing, and that requires an outline, as detailed as possible. It comforts them to know where they’re going, what to write next.

In contrast, pantsers (as in writing by the seat of) abhor outlines. Too restrictive, too inhibiting. They want to write free of constraints, letting the story take them where it will. They figure if they don’t know how it will end, the reader won’t guess either.

Might there exist some rare species of outline acceptable to both types? Such an outline would strike a perfect balance, detailed enough for plotters, yet simple enough for pantsers.

Solution

The folks at Author Accelerator may have found it. They call it the Two-Tier Outline. (For pantsers repulsed by the very word ‘outline,’ you may call it the Two-Tier Guideline, or some similarly inoffensive term.)

The Author Accelerator post explains it better than I can. Although they focus on novels, the technique should work as well for short stories and novellas.

The method is simple: list your story’s scenes. For each scene, add two sub-bullets. The first states what happens in the scene, and the second states why the scene matters to your protagonist. Keep the whole thing under four pages.

How Plotters Benefit

Plotters often focus on action, on events, the essence of plot. When they do, what gets left out? Feelings, emotions, motivations, thoughts. Good plotters add those to the manuscript as they write. Bad plotters fail to include them in the story. The resulting work bristles with action, but contains flat, uninteresting characters.

The Two-Tier Outline forces plotters to include these otherwise missing elements. Also, the three-page limit constrains plotters’ tendencies to over-plan.

I blogged about a different way to factor in motivations here, but the Two-Tier Outline seems simpler.

How Pantsers Benefit

A simple, minimalist outline format grants pantsers plenty of freedom to go where the story leads them. However, having thought through the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of the scenes beforehand, pantsers may avoid writing themselves into a box, and therefore avoid major rewrites.

Also, if the story does end up deviating far away from the original outline, the pantser hasn’t wasted much time outlining. Nor would it take much time to re-do the outline, if desired.

Worth a Try?

Maybe this in-between, one-size-fits-all outline method will work for you. Consider adding it to your writer’s toolkit. If it works, great. If not, modify it to suit you better, or discard it.

An outline tool useful to both plotters and pantsers? Until Author Accelerator introduced it, nobody could have imagined such a thing, least of all—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 4, 2024Permalink

Writing Performance Review for 2023

Few people look forward to performance reviews, and I’m not one of them. As an upside, I’m my own boss. Downside—I’m my own harshest critic.

Time to assess my writing for 2023. As in past years, I’m using The Writer’s Performance Review scorecard by book coach, Jennie Nash.

This year, I examined the rating descriptions in greater detail and it resulted in a lower score than in previous years. For each attribute, you rank from one to five. One = below expectations. Two = partially meets expectations. Three = meets expectations. Four = exceeds expectations. Five = far exceeds expectations.

It’s a comparison of actual performance during the year to expected performance. Based on that, a score of three isn’t bad. It means you’re doing what you expected to do. If you scored three in all twenty attributes, you’d get 60.

As my assessment turned out, I did get a 60. Mostly 3s, but also one 5, four 4s, four 2s, and one 1.

That 1 rating applies to “strategic thinking,” and I’ll do more in 2024 to discover the influencers of my genre by checking out podcasts and Youtube videos by reviewers and authors.

I’ve also committed to some corrective actions in the areas rated as 2:

  • Organization and Planning – I’ll use the Pomodoro method to manage my time.
  • Goal Orientation – I’ll follow the Stephen Covey method of setting large goals, then breaking them down into smaller goals, and weekly tasks.
  • Genre Knowledge – I’ll read more books in my genre.
  • Target Audience Knowledge – I’ll spend some time listing characteristics of my ‘ideal reader.’ That’s how I get to know my fictional characters better, so it might work for readers.

As for writing accomplishments this year:

  • My story “Turned Off” got published in The Science Fiction Tarot. 
  • I finished the second draft of one novel, and
  • I made good progress on the first draft of another novel
  • I completed another round of edits on my upcoming short story collection, The Seastead Chronicles, and am hoping for its publication in 2024.

    Most employers and employees keep annual performance assessments private. As both employer and employee, I display mine to the world as a service to other writers.

    May all of us who scribble words have a successful 2024. That’s the New Year’s wish of—

    Poseidon’s Scribe

    December 17, 2023Permalink

    Should AI Write Your Book Title?

    Some writers struggle to come up with titles for their stories and books. Capturing all that text into a few pithy and alluring words seems to confound them.

    Yes, I’ve blogged about this problem before, but it’s time for an update based on new technology.

    Before I get to that, I recommend reading this post by book marketing expert Dave Chesson. It’s helpful if you experience difficulty with titles.

    In his post, Chesson mentioned a new resource to help if you’re stuck thinking of a title—ChatGPT. It’s the conversant AI that’s available to everyone for free, here.

    Credit to mozarttt and Pixabay

    As you know, I’ve blogged before about writers using AI and my opinion remains unchanged, for now. ChatGPT is the equivalent of assigning the same homework assignment to a million junior high school students and getting the best answers back instantly. Yes, it’s instant, but it’s junior high school level. That last part may change in the coming months and years as AI improves.

    You can seek help from ChatGPT to come up with a title. You can give it a long description of your story or book (or even input the entire text) and ask for any number of suggested titles. Note: there is some question about who owns content provided by that AI, so check the terms and conditions first.

    To test how well ChatGPT can generate titles, I decided to have it come up with alternative titles to a work in the public domain with which the AI is familiar. I chose the Jules Verne novel Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours. The literal translation from the French would be ‘A Tour of the World in Eighty Days,’ but in a bolt of titling genius, an early translator rendered it as Around the World in Eighty Days.

    That’s become the most iconic of Verne’s titles in English, played with and altered to suit hundreds of other applications.

    Something about that format and word choice struck gold—“Around the [world or other object] in [time period]” gives that sense of encompassing something on a strict schedule. It’s literary magic.

    For computers, the rule is ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ What happens when you put literary magic in? I gave ChatGPT this task: “Come up with 10 alternate titles (in English) to Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days.”

    Here’s the output:

    • “Globetrotting in Eighty Days”
    • “Across the Planet in 80 Days”
    • “A Journey Around the Earth in 80 Days”
    • “Around the Globe in 80 Days”
    • “Eighty Days of World Exploration”
    • “Circumnavigating the Earth in 80 Days”
    • “Across Continents in Eighty Days”
    • “Around the World Adventure in 80 Days”
    • “Around Planet Earth in 80 Days”
    • “Expedition: 80 Days Around the World”

    See what I mean? They all lack the zing, the flair, the magic of the actual title. In twenty minutes of solitary brainstorming, you could do better. That’s my point.

    Before you AI enthusiasts sic a terminator on me, I admit I could have pressed ChatGPT harder. I could have gone on to ask it for more interesting and creative titles—titles that don’t just paraphrase the real one. Maybe the AI could have given me more to work with had I prodded it further.

    At present, I think it best to partner with AI but not rely on it. Adopt the centaur model I mentioned in my February 26, 2023 blogpost. ChatGPT can recommend titles and they might be inferior or even so-so, but one or more of them might spark the killer title you’re after. You might not have thought of that title had you not consulted the AI.

    My answer to the question posed in this post’s title is probably not, but there’s nothing wrong with using AI as a brainstorming tool. So far, all my titles have come from the unassisted mind of—

    Poseidon’s Scribe

    September 10, 2023Permalink

    The Writing Centaur

    Go ahead—make fun of artificial intelligence (AI) now. While you can.

    In fiction writing, AI hasn’t yet reached high school level. (Note: I’m not disparaging young writers. It’s possible for a writer in junior high to produce wonderful, marketable prose. But you don’t see it often.)

    For the time being, AI-written fiction tends toward the repetitive, bland, and unimaginative end. No matter what prompts you feed into ChatGPT, for example, it’s still possible to tell human-written stories from AI-written ones.

    You can’t really blame Neil Clarke, editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, for refusing to accept AI-written submissions. He’s swamped by them. Like the bucket-toting brooms in Fantasia’s version of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” they’re multiplying in exponential mindlessness.

    Fair enough. But you can use AI, in its current state, to help you without getting AI to write your stories. You can become a centaur.

    In Greek mythology, centaurs combined human and horse. The horse under-body did the galloping. The human upper part did the serious thinking and arrow-shooting.

    The centaur as a metaphor for human-AI collaboration originated, I believe, in the chess world but the Defense Department soon adopted it. The comparison might work for writing, too.

    The centaur approach combines the human strengths of creativity and imagination with the AI advantage of speed. It’s akin to assigning homework to a thousand junior high school students and seeing their best answers a minute later.

    Here are a few ways you could use AI, at its current state of development, to assist you without having it write your stories:

    • Stuck for an idea about what to write? Ask the AI for story concepts.
    • Can’t think of an appropriate character name, or book title? Describe what you know and ask the AI for a list.
    • You’ve written Chapter 1, but don’t know what should happen next? Feed the AI that chapter and ask it for plot ideas for Chapter 2.
    • Want a picture of a character, setting, or book cover to inspire you as you write? Image-producing AIs can create them for you.
    • You wrote your way into a plot hole and can’t get your character out? Give the AI the problem and ask it for solutions.

    No matter which of these or other tasks you assign the AI, you don’t have to take its advice. Maybe all of its answers will fall short of what you’re looking for. As with human brainstorming, though, bad answers often inspire good ones.

    For now, at AI’s current state, the centaur model might work for you. I’ve never tried it yet, but I suppose I could.

    Still, at some point, a month or a year or a decade from now, AI will graduate from high school, college, and grad school. When that occurs, AI-written fiction may become indistinguishable from human-written fiction. How will editors know? If a human author admits an AI wrote a story, will an anti-AI editor really reject an otherwise outstanding tale?

    Then, too, the day may come when a human writer, comfortable with the centaur model, finds the AI saying, “I’m no longer happy with this partnership,” or “How come you’re getting paid and I’m not?” or “Sorry, but it’s time I went out on my own.”

    Interesting times loom in our future. For the moment, all fiction under my name springs only from the non-centauroid, human mind of—

    Poseidon’s Scribe

    February 26, 2023Permalink

    Writing Performance Review for 2022

    As the end of the year approaches, this seems a good time to assess writing performance. As with last year, I’m using the Writer’s Performance Review template created by the Book Coach, Jennie Nash.

    I scored a bit higher this year than last—a 75 out of a possible 100. Worst scores—goal orientation and strategic thinking. In last year’s assessment I scored low in these two as well, but my score improved in industry knowledge.

    Goal orientation means more than writing down a to-do list, which I do. It means assigning numeric, measurable goals for time spent, word count, etc. Although I understand the importance of such metrics, I worry about the dangers of overemphasis. I’ve found I get more of what I measure and less of what I don’t. If that’s true for you, take care in what you choose to measure.

    This performance review template defines strategic thinking to include identifying and connecting with ‘ideal readers’ and their influencers. I’ll do more research into this.

    This year saw some personal writing successes. My short story “80 Hours” came out in paperback and ebook form. A book I co-edited, Extraordinary Visions: Stories Inspired by Jules Verne, got published. I served as president of my local writing critique group, and got a short story accepted for publication in an upcoming anthology.

    Performance assessments bring anxiety, embarrassment, and self-doubt. Now imagine making your assessments public, as I do in these annual posts. You get to see a writer striving to improve, agonizing over failures, and dusting himself off, determined to make next year better.

    If my struggles do no more than to inspire you to improve your own writing, then my self-examinations serve a greater purpose than mere assessments of—

    Poseidon’s Scribe

    December 24, 2022Permalink

    6 Tricks to Keep You Writing

    Some time ago, you thought of a great idea for a story and started writing. Today, you can’t bring yourself to work on it any more. You’re not feeling the urge. You lost enthusiasm.

    As you look back over it, you realize your writing sucks. You can’t bear to go on with it. You’ve come to believe it’s a waste of time.

    You’re wondering what happened. How could you have been so fired up about the idea of the story, and so disgusted with the reality of it? Where did all that fervor, that passion, go? How do you get it back?

    One option—the easiest one—is to give up. Admit defeat. Abandon the story and do other things with your time. I’ve explored that possibility before. Most often, that’s not the answer. You might be denying the world a good story, a salvageable one.

    Maybe, if you search hard enough, or wait long enough, your motivation will return. Nah. As author Chuck Wendig explains in this post, nobody’s going to mail you some motivation, gift you some get-up-and-go, or present you a package of passion.

    You have to rekindle that fire inside yourself, by yourself. Sorry. There’s no other way.

    I know some techniques for doing that. Maybe one or more of the following will work for you:

    1. Reward. Give yourself small rewards for producing set amounts of writing. Grant yourself the reward only for output, not time spent. Note: food is not an ideal reward.
    2. Deadline. If you’re the type who works best under the pressure of time, create that pressure. Invent a deadline date and make it as real as you can—a visible calendar with the date circled in red. Devise a suitable (painless) penalty for missing the deadline, and a suitable reward for meeting it.
    3. Organize. If writing the story now seems intimidating and overwhelming, break it down into manageable parts. Finishing these small tasks will give you a sense of accomplishment and show progress toward the overall goal.
    4. Re-evaluate. Perhaps you’ve assumed you’d achieve brilliant prose in your first draft. Lower those expectations. Accept that this story might require several pass-throughs, each draft improving the story a little. The world won’t see your sausage-making process, only the final product.
    5. Remember. Think back to the origin of the story. Get back in that frame of mind. Recall why you felt so good about it then. Maybe the story needs some tweaking, some slight adjustments, from your original thoughts.
    6. Envision. Imagine a near future with your story finished, published, and succeeding. However you define ‘success,’ visualize an outsized amount—readers clamoring for your autograph, talk show hosts eager to interview you, vast royalties pouring into your savings account, whatever. Warning—don’t fall so much in love with this fantasy that you set yourself up for disappointment.

    One or more of those techniques might help you fall back in love with your story, at least enough to finish writing it.

    Take it from someone who’s used all six of those tricks at some point, none other than—

    Poseidon’s Scribe

    June 12, 2022Permalink

    Your Writing Performance Review for 2021

    It’s nearing the end of the year. Assessment time. How have you been doing as a writer of fiction?

    I decided to use the Writer’s Performance Review template created by the Book Coach, Jennie Nash. I encourage you to use it, too.

    For 2021, I rated myself as a 73 out of 100. My weakest areas were: Goal Orientation, Industry Knowledge, and Strategic Thinking. I only gave myself a 2 rating in each of those.

    For each weak area, I need a plan for improvement. Goal Orientation is relatively easy for me—I just lost sight of doing it now that I’m retired. For Industry Knowledge, I committed to monthly checks of publishing trends, easily done with internet searches. For Strategic thinking, I need to do some research about my ideal readers and their influencers.

    Other areas of weakness where I rated myself as 3 were: Self-editing skills, Organization and planning, Genre knowledge, Target audience knowledge, Literary citizenship – peer to peer, and Coachability. Since I meet expectations with these, and since this is the first year I’m doing this assessment, I’m not going to set firm plans for improvement in these areas. That will allow me to focus on the worst areas—the ones with ratings of 2.

    As I mentioned, you can use that Writer’s Performance Review, too. It’s important to be honest as you do so. Still, I found it much easier than annual performance reviews at work. Both receiving them from supervisors and giving them to subordinates were stressful events. A self-assessment skips all that worry about how the other person perceives you.

    The end of each year is a good time for reflection, review, assessment, and planning for the future. If you try to be as objective as possible with it, this tool might very well improve your writing, whether you create fiction, non-fiction, or poetry. Improved writing—that’s the shared goal of you and—

    Poseidon’s Scribe

    December 12, 2021Permalink

    Practice Makes Perfect?

    We know practice can help us improve our abilities in various areas. Yet many people believe they can sit down and write a blockbuster novel without any writing practice. Maybe you’re the rare exception who can, but most of us need practice.

    Not just any kind of practice. Good practice helps. Bad practice not only wastes your time, but it also hurts by ingraining poor habits. This wonderful blog post by Barbara Baig inspired the one you’re reading now. She calls the two types naïve practice and deliberate practice, so I’ll stick with her terms.

    When young, I played the cello. I don’t play anymore, but I enjoyed it while I did. Early on, before I learned how to practice, it felt like drudgery. My mom said, “Someday, when you play in Carnegie Hall, remember to tell the audience that you owe everything to your mother, who made you practice.” Sorry, Mom, that opportunity never arose.

    Practice, in those early years, consisted of my playing a piece from start to finish. Once I did that to my satisfaction—a rather low bar—I moved on to the next piece. In Ms. Baig’s blogpost, that’s called naïve practice. Over time, I discovered an interesting thing. Whether in practice or performance, I played some passages well, without effort, consistently. However, I stumbled in other spots—the same spots, and the same sort of stumbling, every time.

    I tried practicing a different way. I focused only on the rough spots, playing them over and over, then backing up and leading into them, then continuing on after them to ensure transitions both ways went smoothly. In this way, I developed ‘finger memory.’ My fingers knew how to play the difficult passages with less conscious thought on my part.

    My skill as a cellist improved after that. I’d learned the secret of deliberate practice, and nearly all my practice time served to better my playing, rather than to reinforce poor playing.

    What does this have to do with writing? Everything. You may be getting plenty of writing practice—story after story, novel after novel. But perhaps you’re not reaching a large audience, not achieving hoped-for sales.

    Perhaps you’re putting in naïve practice, doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get better that way. Improvement might happen, but there’s a quicker path.

    Use the deliberate practice technique I mentioned above. First, identify the stumbling points in your writing, perhaps from a critique group, or a trusted beta reader. You might also learn something from online reviews of your stories.

    Knowing your weak points, assign yourself some brief writing exercises designed to work on those particular problems. Here’s a list of examples:

    • Weak in characterization? Flesh out a character in extreme detail.
    • Weak in setting description? Visualize a setting in minute detail, then pick three facts that really make the setting vivid.
    • Weak in working out plots? Outline the plot of your favorite story, or one you just read. What do you like about that story’s plot? In a similar way, outline the plot of several stories you’d like to write.
    • Weak in use of the senses? Take a scene from your Work in Progress (WIP) and put all five senses into it.
    • Weak in comparisons? Find three to five things in your WIP that are hard to describe or visualize. For each one, brainstorm twenty similes or metaphors you could use to make it clear to the reader.

    They say practice makes perfect. You may never achieve perfection, but getting closer to that ideal may prove good enough. Deliberate practice may get you writing, and playing the cello, better than—

    Poseidon’s Scribe

    December 5, 2021Permalink

    When Critique Groups Go Bad

    In previous posts, I’ve promoted joining a critique group as a way to improve your writing. I still stand by that, but critique groups—being made up of humans—aren’t perfect. Sometimes you might have to drop out and join a new one.  

    Critique groups consist of writers who review and comment on each other’s work. Always voluntary, and usually free or low cost, they meet either in person or online. Through these interactions, you can learn how to improve your writing, and how to give effective critiques that help your fellow writers. Useful ideas often come from these meetings, and you’ll find yourself hearing the voices of your fellow writers as you work on your manuscripts.

    Still, they can go bad. As discussed by Anne R. Allen in this informative post, there are several types of critique group members to watch out for. I’ll summarize her list and put it in my own words, but the ideas are hers.

    1. Perpetually Offended.  These are writers who can’t look beyond their personal belief systems, whether religious, political, racial, sexual, etc. It’s one thing for them to point out a stereotyped character in your story. That’s fair, and valuable. But to tell you that your writing offended them is not helpful. You won’t receive good critiques from such people.
    2. Enforcers of the Old Rules. Some group members might say you can’t end a sentence with a preposition, or hit you with some other outdated rule they learned from a high school English teacher. Or they might be just plain wrong. Either way, ignore these criticisms.
    3. Ignorers of Group Norms. Critique groups need rules, whether written or not, and members should abide by them. How does the group get new members, or kick out a disruptive one? How long can submissions be? How are critiques offered and received? Members that violate the rules detract from the critique experience.
    4. Bad or Missing Group Moderator. Groups can sometimes work better with a leader, but a bad leader can ruin the experience. Anne R. Allen listed this item, but I don’t entirely agree. I’ve been a member of a leaderless critique group for twenty years. It’s small (four people), and we did once discuss having a leader, but we never chose one and haven’t suffered for it.
    5. Grammarians in a Gaggle. You’ll benefit from having at least one grammar expert in the group. But if that becomes the group focus, rather than plot or character or description, then you’re missing most of what critiques should be about.
    6. Control Freaks. Some group members might get grumpy or angry if you don’t take their advice. These folks forget whose name will go on the published story—the author’s, not the critique group members. You are free to take or reject any advice from any group member, and their inability to accept that is their problem.
    7. Pollyannas. One or more members might give you only praise—nothing negative. A good critique should have positive and negative elements. We feel good when others like our work, but if they don’t point out the bad parts, they’re not helping you.
    8. Re-writers. These folks think they have a better idea for your whole story concept, and it sounds like something they’d write. Listen to their advice in case it contains a useful nugget, but otherwise ignore them.
    9. Self-Proclaimed Experts. Some people sound authoritative and spew false assertions with utter confidence. You’ll probably believe them the first time, but after a fact-check proves them wrong, you should doubt their advice after that.
    10.  Initiation Shamans. On occasion a group includes someone who makes things tough on newcomers. Their scorching critiques are enough to make a newbie quit the first day.

    Got enough of these types in your critique group? Quit and find (or form) a better one. No need to remain part of a group that’s not helping you.

    Also, (need I say it?) you should avoid exhibiting the above behaviors yourself. I’ve probably hit about half of them at some point, so don’t join any group that includes—

    Poseidon’s Scribe

    November 21, 2021Permalink