Mette Harrison wrote a blog about how various authors respond when they read a book, don’t like it, and then the book’s author asks them directly what they thought of the book. 

Here’s my response.

As an author when I ask someone, especially another author, about their experience with my story, I’m looking for a data point to see how the book’s working or to get some insight. I realize others might be looking for validation. And, of course, I hope that everyone who reads my stuff finds nirvana even if I know that is not going to be the case. But I don’t ask unless I want data. And so I would hope they would report their experience accurately. I also hope they do it in friendly and helpful manner.

So because that’s what I want, that’s what I try to do for others.  And the sandwich+ method has been one good way for me to do that.

1. State something specific that works for me, e.g. “I love your character Bill because he’s so outrageous.”
 
2. State the key thing that’s giving me trouble. For example, I might say, “I am having a hard time with the pacing.” But then I ALWAYS want to give the context of me as reader when it applies to my reaction, e.g. I’m a terribly impatient reader, I like to feel hope in what I read and know I don’t like as much despair as many other readers do, I can’t stand clowns (this is true: clowns are some of the scariest creatures out there, second only to crocodiles). The author should know these readerly things when they apply so the author can understand where the comments are coming from.

If the book’s in pro shape and I think the issue is mostly my tastes, then it’s also useful to compare their work to another successful piece or author that had the same issue for me, e.g. “This reminds me of Twilight; I know people love it, but I just couldn’t get into that book either for the same reason.”

I don’t think this is fluff. I think it’s part of being accurate. Our reality is what we focus on. And if I make a statement that leaves an author thinking I think the work is bad, then that’s not accurate because the truth is I think I’m not in the audience.

If I think it’s a craft issue, then I highlight the main thing I think is causing the problem. A laundry list is usually useless. But thoughtful focus on the key issue can be very helpful. If I can’t tell whether it’s a taste issue or a craft issue, I admit it.

3. State something else that’s working for me, e.g. “While I just couldn’t get past all those clowns freaking me out, I did think your chapter openers were compelling. I always wanted to read more, but then, alas, clowns.”

4. The + is not just leaving statements hanging. Asking some sincere questions after demonstrates my genuine interest. And I am interested. If the book is unpublished, I might ask about their plans for the book, are they going to be doing another draft or shopping it, or if my reaction is common. If it’s published I might ask how it’s being received, what others are liking about it, and what’s next.  Maybe they tell me about another project they’re working on that sounds fascinating.

This is what I’d want an author to do for me–be accurate, interested, and friendly. In such a context, someone having issues with a story is not such a big deal. It really isn’t.

At a recent writer’s conference I was on a panel and someone asked what the pros and cons of writing groups were.  Writing groups can save AND kill your writing. So beware.

Workshop Benefits

Writing groups are great for:

• Encouragement
• Deadline motivation
• Having fun with other authors
• Getting a chance to think about and discuss craft
• Testing your work

The benefits listed above can all be huge helps to a writer. However, there are two traps that many individuals fall into. You want to avoid both of these because they are plagues that can not only infect, but kill your writing.

Workshop Plague 1: submitting for fixes instead of effect

The first problem occurs when a writer forgets that the purpose of sharing your work with the group is NOT to have them tell you what to do. It’s to test your product on readers who are likely to be in the audience for that particular type of story (please note the last part of that sentence as well).

But in many groups this isn’t what happens. The writer submits his work and then hopes it does well. If it does, he purrs and goes his way rejoicing. If it doesn’t, he figures the group will tell him what to do to fix it. In such groups the readers often arrive with a list of “you shoulds” or “I woulds.”

• The dialogue here is clunky, you should…
• These characters are stereotypes, I would…
• You have infodumps here, here, and here: you should…

This all sounds great, right?

Wrong.

This tells a writer very little that’s worthwhile. What was the problem all these shoulds and woulds are trying to fix? You can’t tell. And not knowing the problem, you don’t know if the fix is really going to work. In fact, the suggested fix might be completely wrong for the story. You are the story designer. YOU have to figure out what’s really wrong and then select the right fix.

Case in point: at this conference another author told of a time her editors came back and said the novel needed to be shorter. It was too slow. In reality, the novel was too short. The real fix was to make it longer. She was skimming the surface of the story in summary and needed to go deeper. She made it longer, and the story worked. But if she had been looking for fixes instead of symptoms she would have done the exact wrong thing for her story.

The most productive thing a writer can hear is what effect the text was having on the reader. Was the reader bored, lost, or feeling it was made up? Or was the reader surprised, intrigued, fascinated, freaked out? In short, did it do what the story was supposed to do to the reader?  An accurate report of the reader experience is invaluable. But a list of shoulds and woulds by the Fixits is not. You want symptoms, not diagnoses and presecriptions.

Of course, when you understand the symptoms, you can very easily open it up to the group for suggestions on ways to fix it. Sometimes brilliant solutions arise from such discussions. Sometimes they don’t. Othertimes, they simply provide a way for the writer to work it out in his own mind. But in the end, YOU as writer have to do what’s right for the story you feel in your gut.

One time to be especially careful of this is when you submit revisions of a story to the same group. Here’s why: when someone says a revision lacks blood and vitamins, it may be this is actually the case. But it also might simply be a case of diminishing returns, e.g. the first ice cream cone you eat is great, the second okay, the fourth begins to make you sick. Would the movie you just saw on Friday night be just as powerful if you saw it again on Saturday? And then again on Monday? I know it’s not exactly what’s happening, but it’s similar. After reading a manuscript multiple times, a reader sometimes can see nothing but the stitching.

Furthermore, a reader will often get revision ideas that jazz them about the story only to find the author was jazzed about some other revision idea. And that can often disappoint. And if this multiple revision reading goes through multiple cycles, I’ve found it becomes harder and harder for the reader to avoid becoming a director of sorts, the author trying to perform to their taste. I done this far too often to people feeding me multiple revisions. 

There’s an easy way around this one: simply avoid submitting any individual story to the same set of readers more than once.  However, I don’t want to suggest you should NEVER submit revisions to the same set of readers. Orson Card submits all his work, originals and revisions, to his wife Kristine. I submit mine to my wife and editors. Many writers have trusted readers. Just be aware that submitting multiple revisions can very easily lead to our chasing someone else’s opinion instead of writing the story we feel in our guts.  Tread with caution.

Workshop Plague 2: reading for rule compliance instead of effect

 The second problem occurs when you have readers who have forgotten that the ONLY thing that matters is effect. Many times writers will build a list of writing rules as they learn the craft. And they will forget that the rules are, by themselves, meaningless. Please see my post on Rules vs. Objectives. These well-meaning folks come, not with an accurate report of their reading experience, but with a list of your rule violations.

So instead of hearing that the story immediately pulled the reader in but that by page four the reader’s mind was wandering, the reader points out that you started the story with dialogue and you shouldn’t do that. Or that you used said-bookisms, which was a very flabby and naughty thing to do. Or that you had more than one point-of-view in the chapter. Or that you chapters were too short or too long. Or whatever it is that that particular reader has in their rule book.

This kind of feedback is worthless. I don’t care if my story started with dialogue. What I want to know is if it pulled the reader in. And when I say “reader” I mean  one who is looking for a story, not for rule infractions. What you want is an accurate report of the reading experience. That’s it. Both the good and the bad.

Here’s an example of what I try to do when I read and report. It’s not the only way, but it illustrates what I’m talking about.

1. I read the story as a normal reader. No pencil or pen in hand. I’m just thinking: okay, I hope this is good.
2. I read until I’m bored, lost, or (hopefully) turn the last page in delight. Some folks may wonder why I wouldn’t read to the end of everything I’d agreed to report on. Simple. If I’m bored or lost I’m OUT of the story and cannot judge the effect of what follows as a reader. Maybe I’m bored because of the craft. Maybe I’m bored because I’m not in the audience for that kind of story. If this is the case, my experience doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t give a romance to a thriller reader and then expect them to love it, would you? Well, authors are no different. Just because we write doesn’t mean we automatically love everything (please see my blog Is 90% of Everything Crap). 
3. I write up my experience, making sure I accurately report who and what I was interested in, what delighted me, what bored me, where I was lost, or didn’t believe etc. I’m also very particular to clearly separate  the things that had a big effect on my experience versus those that had a small one. For example, some confusion in an exchange of dialogue might be a small thing. Confusion in a whole chapter is a big thing. As a writer I don’t want a laundry list. I want to get a sense of proportion. And I want to know if the reader generally enjoyed the story or not. It’s one thing to know the story is busted. It’s another to know that it works, but has a few paint spots.  
4. If I did not read through to the end, I do so now. Or maybe I skim. Just to get an idea of the whole story.
5. Then I ask myself what I think this story was trying to do. What kind of an experience, what kind of delights was it offering up to the reader? Suspense, delightful characters, romance, wonder, cool textual pyrotechnics, etc.
6. Having an idea of what the story was trying to do, I see if I can’t diagnose the problems and think of some ways to fix them.
7. Finally, I give my report to the writer. I include #3. Then I add #5 and #6, stating that here’s ”what I think the root of my issues were and some ideas that might help.”

You might do it differently. Just make sure you focus on accurately reporting your experience reading for effect, not rule compliance. Once you have a number of reports you can see what’s working and what isn’t. If one out of ten people has an issue with a certain part, I may or may not ignore it, depending on my own judgment. However, if four to seven of them have an issue, I’m probably going to fix it.

So writing groups can be wonderful. Just be careful to avoid these two plauges as if they were, well, plagues.

Whenever you talk in speculative fiction circles about quality writing you will inevitably hear someone cite Sturgeon’s Law.

Theodore Sturgeon, a science fiction writer, defended science fiction against critics of the genre who said that 90% of science fiction was crap by saying that 90% of everything–film, literature, consumer goods, etc.–was crap. Therefore, pointing out that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms do. So neener neener neener.

The problem with this “law” is that it isn’t a law. It’s not something discovered through rigorous testing and careful evaluation of data. In fact, no testing was performed. It’s an opinion, but “Sturgeon’s Opinion” lacks the authoritative power needed to silence the critics. 

Unfortunately, while citing the law may be a good way to give the literati what for, it’s a terrible way to think about books. I say this because we often mistake “poor quality” with “it wasn’t to my taste.” By doing so we mislabel diamonds as dirt.

How can this be? The answer is in the true nature of quality.

The business world has spent many years and much treasure trying to understand what quality is. I think writers and readers can benefit from the paths they’ve blazed. I found a great summary of quality on Wikipedia.

Business has tried to define quality in a producer-consumer context, with the following variations:

1. ISO 9000: “Degree to which a set of inherent characteristic fulfills requirements.”^[2] The standard defines requirement as need or expectation.
2. Six Sigma: “Number of defects per million opportunities.”^[3] The metric is tied in with a methodology and a management system.
3. Philip B. Crosby: “Conformance to requirements.”^[4][5] The difficulty with this is that the requirements may not fully represent customer expectations; Crosby treats this as a separate problem.
4. Joseph M. Juran: “Fitness for use.”^[5] Fitness is defined by the customer.
5. Noriaki Kano and others, presenting a two-dimensional model of quality: “must-be quality” and “attractive quality.”^[6] The former is near to the “fitness for use” and the latter is what the customer would love, but has not yet thought about. Supporters characterize this model more succinctly as: “Products and services that meet or exceed customers’ expectations.”
6. Robert Pirsig: “The result of care.”^[7]
7. Genichi Taguchi, with two definitions:

   a. “Uniformity around a target value.”^[8] The idea is to lower the standard deviation in outcomes, and to keep the range of outcomes to a certain number of standard deviations, with rare exceptions.

   b. “The loss a product imposes on society after it is shipped.”^[9] This definition of quality is based on a more comprehensive view of the production system.

8. American Society for Quality: “a subjective term for which each person has his or her own definition. In technical usage, quality can have two meanings:

   a. the characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs;

   b. a product or service free of deficiencies.”^[5]

9. Peter Drucker: “Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for.”^[10]

The common element of the business definitions is that the quality of a product or service refers to the perception of the degree to which the product or service meets the customer’s expectations. Quality has no specific meaning unless related to a specific function and/or object. Quality is a perceptual, conditional and somewhat subjective attribute.

What does this mean for writers and readers?

It means that your audience defines quality. But your audience is never all of those that read. It’s only the narrow segment that reads for the type of experience you’re offering.

It means that a story can be of the highest quality, but you still may not like it. You might even hate it.

It means that Sturgeon’s Law is, no disrespect intended, crap.

All writers should consider NY Times best-seller Tess Gerritsen’s experience writing for two different audiences.

I’ve had too many smart and well-read friends like stories I do not. I’ve loved too many stories that others could not. I’ve seen too many stories I couldn’t read more than two pages of picked up by editors and find audiences. And the tales of editors passing up on stories that some other editor picked up and which became mega-sellers are legion. 

Quality has never been an absolute. The truth is that while I enjoy many stories in a variety of genres, a lot of what’s published is not to my taste, but it’s still very good.  

A more accurate statement of Sturgeon’s Law would be something like “90% of what’s out there isn’t to my taste.”

For readers this means we need to be careful to distingush between something that doesn’t work for the audience it’s intended for and something that simply doesn’t work for us. For writers this means we need to write the best story we can and then avoid pressing it onto the wrong audience. And when we do get a bad review, we need to figure out if it’s the quality of the story or just a matter of taste.