That’s the acid test for every writer: four words.
If somebody in line with you for the Largest Latte Known to Man asks what you’re working on, can you explain it in four words?
How about eight words?
Because if you can’t, you’re not really done.
And I don’t care that you’ve spent the last seven years locked away in a French monastery, slaving away 25 hours a day, eight days a week to perfect (a) The Great American Novel, Even Though It Was Written in France, (b) the movie script that will turn Hollywood on its ear and stop it from spending $250 million apiece on Michael Bay explosion-fests involving robots that transform into cars or whatever or (c) a punk-rock masterpiece with song after song with lyrics so beautiful, and rebelliously ugly, that anyone who listens to it quits working for The Man and buys an electric Fender so they can learn the only three chords you need to know to become AN INSANE ROCK GOD.
So let’s get down to it. If you haven’t already, read these posts to get all educated and such, even though it is technically cheating — because today, there is a quiz.
Every writer gets the notion — from college, from movies, from the Series of Tubes — that they should be in a critique group.
This notion is seven separate types of wrong.
It’s time for critique groups to go the way of the rotary phone — to make way for something better, faster and stronger.
Peoples of the interwebs: critique groups are obsolete
A critique group is useful for certain things:
(a) university professors who want students to break into groups and leave him alone for the next 45 minutes,
(b) writers who really, really like to read their work aloud,
(c) literary snobs who like to say silly pretentious things about the work of others, and
(d) happy writers who like to socialize with fellow writers and talk smack about the craft while drinking bourbon.
Sidenote: Yes, your particular critique group is wonderful, and you couldn’t live without it. No worries. I’m not driving to your house with the Anti-Critique Group Secret Police to disband it or anything. Also, your critique group’s amazing bylaws and secret handshakes mitigate all the typical disadvantages of plain old boring critique groups that are not nearly as awesome.
Reason No. 1: Critique groups take far too much time
During college, sure, you’ve got time to sit in a group, read chapters aloud and debate what Susie really meant by having the protagonist drink a bottle of ketchup in Chapter 2.
Once you graduate from college, get a job, get married, buy a house and have little pookies, THERE IS NO TIME for this type of nonsense. Do I have three hours to drive to somebody’s house, listen to chapters read aloud, then talk about what I remember of those words and drive home? No. I have ten flipping minutes to write silly blog posts.
People who write for monies, full time, do not gather around a table to read their text aloud while fellow writers and editors listen carefully and ponder the words. It does not happen.
Reason No. 2: Editing as a group is dangerous and slow
Anything written by a committee will stink up the joint, right? Writing is a solitary act.
Editing is, too. You write a thing, then you give it to an editor.
Typically, there are different levels of editing: at a newspaper, you ship your text to the city editor, who gives it the first whack and focuses on the big picture. Later, the draft goes to the copy desk for a different type of editing, more of a polish and proofing.
Also, editing it best done on a keyboard, or with a red pen. Not out loud in a social group, where peer pressure and weird dynamics can screw up a draft in two seconds flat.
Reason No. 3: Critique groups can’t handle most things we write today
Short stories and novels. That’s what critique groups are really built to handle.
And they do a bad job on novels. Why? Because reading a novel in tiny chunks every week will (a) take forever and (b) turn the focus onto pretty words rather than structure and story. You need to see the entire airplane before you can say, with authority, whether it’ll fly or not. Peeking at tiny pieces of it all year doesn’t work.
Traditional critique groups are bullocks when it comes to editing blog posts, speeches, opeds, screenplays, newspaper stories, magazine features, obituaries and haikus. That’s right, haikus. YOU CAN’T HANDLE THEM.
Reason No. 4: Because I say so
That’s it.
I could put some bullets beneath here, if you want to make it official. Here you go:
Because
I
Say
So.
Let’s invent something new
Now, there is a place for some kind of thing that’s LIKE a critique group, except better, faster and stronger.
Everybody needs an editor. And the more important a thing is, the more you should hire a professional editor who actually does this stuff for a living. But for a whole bunch of things that we write — including silly blog posts — hiring a pro would be a waste of money and time.
So let’s invent a new Writing Monster that’s better, faster and stronger.
Better
The Writing Monster should be flexible, able to handle the editing of any kind of writing, whether it’s a little blog post, a speech, a short story or a screenplay.
It should also expose people to new ideas and new ways of looking at writing, and inspire us to rip the pages out of stupid pretentious books.
And it should expose us to different types of writers and editors, not just fellow writers who have the same exact skills and writerly prejudices.
Faster
The Writer Monster Thing should use this thing we call the Series of Tubes and travel at the speed of light rather than the Speed of Steve’s Subaru as you carpool to Jane’s house for the critique group and hope that she didn’t make that bean salad again.
Stronger
The Writing Monster should be strong and resilient, living in the cloud and forging connections with writers and editors anywhere, like the Borg‘s hive mind collective.
BTW: Resistance is futile.
The Writing Monster will NOT die because Steve moved to Idaho or Jane discovered that she hates Tyler’s novel and, to be honest, his stinking guts.
Also, the Writing Monster will focus more on short, important things like concepts, pitches and structure. Things that take up less than a page. (Kristen the Lamb is onto something with her Concept Critique Group idea.)
The alternative is spending every week for the next year dissecting Steve’s 125,000-word epic about vampire elves with lightsabers riding dinosaurs and Jane’s memoir about growing up on a potato farm in Idaho.
Now, I have the guts of an idea, and a burning desire to blow up critique groups in an explosion that will make Michael Bay jealous. But that’s a post for another day. So: shoot me your crazy ideas in the comment section.
You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to write books or become, I don’t know, the governor of Alaska.
Don't let the hat fool you. Beneath that hat is the brain of an actual brain scientist who focuses her powers on using science to help writers. She is not a wannabe gangster, at least not that I know of; maybe she does use her giant brain to rob banks or mess with the stock market . Go visit her blog.
HOWEVER: There is an honest-to-goodness neuroscientist grad student at MIT who uses serious brain Science to help writers craft amazing things. Yes, she may look 20 years old, and frankly, she could be 12 or 257 years for all I care, because she is a freaking genius.
Her blog about using brain science to help writers is seven entirely separate types of awesome, and it is a public service to writers all over the planet.
Governments should give her big fat tax subsidies. Billionaires riding around on their yachts should take a second to write her a grant or six.
If you’re a writer, a reader or at all literate in the English language, go visit her blog to get educated and enlightened. She also has a book, which you can purchase with your fake digital monies over the Series of Tubes.
You can also follow the whippersnapper genius on the Twitter at @lkblackburne
For people who like things all neat and organized:
The writers that I know and love all do the same thing: they write more than they talk.
And to them, 200 words is nothing.
Bam, here you go. Next?
So use your clickity mouse and get your penmonkey behind to this flash-fiction contest, over at the Soul and Sweet Tea blog.
DO IT NOW. Then come back here and I’ll tell you a secret.
Joey the Francisco of Soul and Sweet Tea, a great blog for writers and book lovers. Go visit it.
Why do this?
I’ll tell you why.
First, you need a break — something to write with no pressure, no worries. Whether you’re a screenwriter or speechwriter, a newspaper reporter or a novelist, IT IS REQUIRED that you stretch a different writing muscle sometimes. You can’t keep doing the same thing forever. The contest includes a bunch of photos as writing prompts. People of the interwebs, this is easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
Second, the person behind this blog, Joey the Francisco, is not only a crazy smart writer (a scientist type, and president of some nuclear medicine shebang). No. She’s also kind, witty and a writer of thrillers. Trifecta, people. Ta-righ-fek-TAH.
Third, I am a secret GUEST JUDGE for this contest.
Don’t tell anybody. That would ruin the secret.
Pretend you don’t know or ask Will Smith to wipe out your memory of this post, along with your memories of WILD WEST, BAD BOYS 2 and I AM LEGEND, which put the B in Boring despite featuring mondo zombies. I did not think this was possible.
How can a movie with zombies be Snooze City? Then again, LAYER CAKE is (1) a mob movie, with (2) all kinds of action and violence that (3) starred Daniel 007 Craig, and it was perhaps the most boring movie on the planet until HUGO came out. My God.
Back to the flash fiction shebang: Have I been a judge of literary contests before? Sure. This is not my first rodeo. Have I competed in rodeos before? No. Cage matches to the death against mountain lions and bear? Also no. They are my neighbors, and as long as they leave me alone — and I consider pooping on my land at 3 a.m., when I’m asleep, as leaving me be — then I’ll leave them alone.
HOWEVER: those were Serious Contests about Serious Things, and what I wrote for comments was seriously tame.
This is pure fun. So go, do it, be wild. Write whatever you want for 200 words. THIS IS AMERICA, unless you are in Canada, the UK, Australia or whatever. Either way, I am pretty damn sure writing flash fiction won’t get you a visit from the secret police, unless you’re in Syria, North Korea and about six other places I can’t remember right off.
While we are at it, and because it’s Friendly Friday, this blog we’re talking about — Soul and Sweet Tea — is good stuff. Go show Joey the Francisco some writerly love by subscribing to the blog and following her tweets . She is not annoying and would never pimp books 25 hours a day, eight days a week, because she has wonderful manners, even on the Series of Tubes.
Note: Some folks have reported TECHNICAL PROBLEMS with posting their brilliant 200 words on Joey’s blog. Do not erase your flash fiction or fall into a steaming vat of despair. Post those 200 words as a comment here and I’ll send minions to get those words to Atlanta in time for the contest deadline (Sunday).
Let’s do a little more math to see how much we should be cranking out, if we’re not surfing the net, Twittering our lives away and checking out Facebook photos all day.
"In my insomniacal Twitter meanderings I find the miracle of @speechwriterguy. Follow him. He makes energetic sense about words. And life."
@CharlesCrawford / Oxford area, England / Former British Ambassador turned speechwriter, writer, mediator, trainer, blogger. Founder member of ADRg Ambassadors LLP
"Informative, funny, blunt & quirky, @speechwriterguy 's blog is a must if you really give a damn about language & communication."
@DavidWeedmark / Ottawa, Canada / Acclaimed poet & novelist with a penchant for dark roast coffee; passionately curious.
