Critiquing Technique: Thoroughly read the submitted pieces prior to arriving at the workshop. Mark up the piece as this will help with your verbal comments and provide the author with tangible points to consider later. Type or write up your comments (sign your name). This will help you, the critiquer, to organize your thoughts about the story for the three-minute limit that you have to speak. Do not be afraid to point out the faults of a story (do not be harsh!). Sometimes it is hard to make negative criticism, but pointing out weaknesses is the purpose of a writer’s workshop. If you recognize a fault or problem, suggest a solution, or offer an idea to help. Experience or expertise is always appreciated. Before you offer criticisms on word usage, make sure that you know what the word means, or have looked up the meaning of the word in a good dictionary. Same for grammar. It is one thing to point out flaws, it is another to solve them. When you see a problem, suggest ways to resolve it. This approach is easier on the receiver, and it will improve your writing skills at the same time. Sometimes it will even clarify your train of thought. As a writer, recognize that suggestions do not have to be used; it is after all, the writer’s story. Remember, if an author chooses to espouse an unpopular idea, or a value system that is not yours – leave it alone. Ideas are beyond criticism; only the craft of the writing or factual information that calls the story’s verisimilitude into question is fair game. Each reviewer will take a turn and have the floor (two minutes – no more than five minutes); others present will be courteous and not interrupt. They will have their turn and will likewise not be interrupted. The author will remain silent, except to ask for a point of clarification while the reviewers give their comments. Do NOT take story criticism personally. The first time your work is critiqued, it can be difficult – even painful. If you are still learning on how to offer comments, critique in a tactful manner – no points given for taking scalps. Do mention those points that you enjoyed. Be gentle with your comments, and always keep in mind the difference between constructive and destructive criticism. Personal criticism is unwanted, unneeded, and will be rejected. After the reviewers have had their say (short, sweet and to the point), the author has the opportunity to comment upon the reviews, explain what was intended or ask for ideas. Author’s limit is five minutes. Remember, once you learn to accept criticism and how to use it, then your writing can and will improve. Recognize that good critiquing comes with careful analysis and solid knowledge of what constitutes good writing. Remember, the first rule of writing is... Write!
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Fiction Critiquing - Submission
Submissions: To submit a piece for critiquing to the Fiction Writers Workshop you must have already critiqued two pieces in a previous session. Also, when you submit a piece, you must have meaningful critiques – constructive, thoughtful and of substance – of the other pieces submitted to the same workshop. In other words, to be critiqued, you must critique. In addition, to belong to the Fiction Writers Workshop, you must submit a piece at least each six months. Submit only complete short stories or full chapters from a novel, not to exceed 7,500 words. If longer, submit a complete scene within the word limit length. If submitting a chapter from a novel, provide a summary or synopsis when the entire manuscript cannot be submitted. Submissions are distributed via e-mail (as an attachment) at least a week before, but not longer than two weeks prior to the workshop date (usually the third Saturday of the month). Send it to those listed in the e-mail header of the workshop announcement. This way the critiquer has sufficient time to do a conscientious job, and doesn’t do it too far in advance to forget useful comments. Recognize that the summary of a novel will be reviewed also, with focus upon the ideas and the overall story structure. In the case of a novel, offer to provide previous chapters to critiquers who haven’t been involved from chapter one. Format your manuscript to professional standards - to do otherwise marks you as an amateur, and should you submit an item for publication, will be the kiss of death.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
How to Post to this Website
...it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people
don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
—Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein,
Howard Koch
- Where to Get Technical Help
- Why and How to Get an Account
- Accepting the Invitation
- The Dashboard
- Posting your Work to the Website
- Labels
- Post Options
- Software for composing your document
- Before composing: Test your editor
- HTML: What it looks like and what it does
- Table: common HTML tags
- More on HTML
Anyone who's taken a step or two beyond just dreaming of getting their first book deal has probably spent some time wondering, How do I break into this business? Whether a budding writer has or has not committed some quality cognitive time on this question, it is worthwhile wondering about. For while you might have a boxful of pages of poetry in your desk drawer or a directory full of files on your computer, either or both of which might contain engaging writing, screaming to be read by the world, none of it, not one whit of wisdom, not a single electric escapade, will make it to the world's bookshelves without an audience. Whether you're courted by a major house or you're self-publishing, a readership is critical. The web's first and middle names aren't "world" and "wide" for no reason. Even the most established and successful writers have a web presence and they have them to reach out to and expand their audiences.
Collaboration can multiply that reach and expanse manifold. If it's true that "there's strength in numbers," then a website with a good number of pre-famous writers— like ourselves— could well be as alluring and captivating as a site touting one, sole writer, however prominent. Witness and ponder the benefits of synergy sites like Wikipedia and YouTube, the Daily Kos, and facebook, and the power of a large number of writers working in concert becomes abundantly apparent.
Where to Get Technical Help
Like most other things humans do, posting your work to the web isn't second nature and certainly not something we're born knowing how to do. Evidence garnered from discoveries of several feral children suggests that language itself isn't an innate human capability, but rather must be learned. Anyone who's tried to learn a foreign language might relate to the situation of the feral child who's grown into a world where the notion of language itself is foreign. Fortunately, though many might feel like they've been born outside that quasi-linguistic experience we know as the web world, working into it is much easier than learning a language, really no more difficult than baking a cake or building a table or shooting a movie.
To get a good number of members of our group started posting to this site, we'll discuss getting your author account on this website, accessing that account, posting your work to the website, working with HTML, and a few other related topics. As with most technical topics, no one resource can possibly cover every contingency you might encounter. Other sources of helpful information are cited at the end of this article. Should you still be stumped, share your problem with the members of our email list designated for this purpose.
In addition, when signing into your Blogger account and while posting articles to the website, you'll notice that Google everywhere provides context-sensitive help pages. For many questions the web in general is a good source of information. Last but not least, immediately below each article on the website is a link to click if you want to "Post a Comment", so have a look immediately below this article for comments and discussion on the topics discussed here.
Much of this article is a "walk-through" of the webpages you'll need to navigate as you create your account and your profile on it, and then post your first article to the website. Because these instructions are quite detailed in places, it would be best to read this article while you are online and navigating these pages. Either print out this article and consult it while creating your account etc., or open two browser windows (or tabs) and switch back and forth between these instructions and the webpages you are navigating.
Why and How to Get an Account
Though this is a collaborative website— blog, if you prefer— not just anyone in the world can contribute to it. Unless she becomes a paying member of West Side Writers, Britney Spears can't post here. Nor can Gerhard Schröder or Charles Schultz, Mick Jagger or Oprah Winfrey. The first requirement for posting to this site, http://westsidewriters.blogspot.com/, is that you're a paid member of West Side Writers. If you are, you'll receive in your email an invitation to be a contributor (an author) on our website.
The second requirement is that you give your email address to Malcolm. We can't very well send you an email containing the invitation if we don't have your email address, can we now? Malcolm will give your email address to me and I'll have the website email you your invitation. That formal invitation will have a Subject line reading, You have been invited to contribute... and a line in the body of the email saying approximately, "To contribute to this blog, visit: http://www.blogger.com/...." Depending upon which email program you use and how it is configured to interact with your web browser, you will either simply click on the URL (the underlined and/or highlighted part which begins "http") or, failing that, you will need to cut and paste the URL into the address bar of your browser (the space where you type in web addresses).
Whichever way you do it, you should arrive at web page with a form into which you're asked to enter your email address and a password for your already existing Google account. At this time, however, you don't yet have that account— except, of course, you've created already a Google account for some other reason. If you do in fact already have a Google account, you should skip down to the next section. Otherwise, click on Create your account now and follow Google to the next page where you'll enter in your email address and a password you invent (and remember for when you want log in later). You'll also be asked for a display name; this is the name that will automatically appear every time you contribute to the website. You may use your real name, a pen name, or any other moniker you please. Blogger allows you to change this name anytime later, after you log in, so the name you choose now isn't critical.
Two other items on this form are the Word Verification and the Acceptance of Terms. The first of these is merely a precaution which prevents internet robots from creating thousands of Blogger accounts programmatically. The Acceptance of Terms checkbox tells Google that you have read and agreed to its Terms of Service, a legally binding document which stipulates the responsibilities which attach to your use of Google's services. Checking this checkbox without reading the Terms of Service is a little like signing a legal document without reading it... not a good practice.
After you fill in this form and click on the orange Continue arrow, Blogger will take you back to the page where you can accept the invitation.
Accepting the Invitation
At the page entitled Blogger: West Side Writers - Join a Blog (displayed at the very top of your browser's border), you'll enter your email address (unless you just created your account) and password and then click on the blue button below entitled ACCEPT INVITATION. This will take you to what Google calls the "Dashboard".
The Dashboard
The Dashboard is a webpage you will return to often, so have a good look at it. In the uppermost right corner you'll see a text link which says, Sign out. Don't click on this now, but just be advised that it's important to exit from your account when you've finished your session. This prevents other people from (inadvertantly or purposefully) getting into your account and changing things. If you sign out, this will simply mean that you'll have to enter your email address and password to get back to the Dashboard.
Inside the white rectangle you'll see a listing of your blogs. Of course if West Side Writers is your only blog, it will be the only one listed. To the right of and below this white area, there's a lot of other text and graphics, most of which you don't need to concern yourself with now. Just two items, a couple links on the far right, deserve mention. One of these is Edit Profile. Clicking on this will take you to another webpage where you can amend your "display name" (a.k.a., pen name), change the email address you use for this account, or add audio, graphics, and textual content to your profile. If you make any changes to your profile that you want to save, be sure to click on the orange button on the bottom which says Save Profile. To get back to the Dashboard, click on the word Dashboard in the upper right corner near to the Sign out link; clicking on Dashboard in the upper-left of the white box does the same thing.
The other items of note on this page is the word Help sitting right next to Sign out in the uppermost-right corner of the blue section and the several Help Resources in the right column. If you have a question or problem, these links are probably your best resources for finding a desired solution. Blogger provides quite a lot of help pages and, being a Google product, the Blogger help pages allow you to run a search for what you want.
In addition, most all of the Blogger help pages allow you to pose questions and/or post comments, though don't expect a live person to be there to respond immediately. If you ask a question or make comment, you'll want to do so intelligently. So jot down a few notes about what you were trying to do, what webpage you were on, what you clicked on, and what worked for you and what didn't. As is often the case, it's difficult to get a good answer, or even a response, to a vaguely or inaccurately formed question. The good news is that Google has been working on its Blogger software for a long time and with its long history of many users providing feedback, it has worked through most all the issues and inconveniences. Problems with Blogger are now quite rare.
Posting your Work to the Website
There are several different ways to put your work to the website and into the public eye. The one you'll likely use most often, and so the one we'll discuss first, involves composing your work offline and then logging into your Blogger account (what we just did above) to post it.
To do this, go to the Blogger Dashboard and click on New Post. This will take you to a webpage with text fields for the Title of your piece (your poem or short story etc.), an optional Link, perhaps to some other webpage you're responding to, and a big text box where you will enter the body of your document.
If you want, you can type in the text of your document in the big text box, clicking on the various icons in the row immediately above to select the desired font, to mark sections of text to be displayed in bold or italics or various colors, to justify sections of your text left, right, or centered, and to do other formatting. You can even create numbered or bulleted lists and spellcheck your document here. Holding your mouse pointer over any of the icons will pop up a brief explanation of what each icon does. Clicking on the preview link to the right of the icons will bring up a display showing you pretty much what the formatting you do to your document will look like.
While you could compose your document right in this text box, you'll most likely find it preferable to compose offline and then copy and paste your finished document into this text box from your editor. After that, you could use these formatting tools to give your document a more professional and satisfying appearance.
Rather than pointing-and-clicking in Blogger to format a document, you might find you have more control and get more predictable results by formatting a document offline and then, after it's formatted to your satisfaction, cutting and pasting the entire document into the text box. This method requires a bit of knowledge of HTML and so requires a little study and practice. But HTML is not at all difficult. Later in this document we'll look at the basics and provide a link or two to more information.
To copy and paste an already formatted document into the text box, be sure to first click on the Edit HTML tab to the right of and immediately above the icons. Then just copy the relevant text in your editor and paste it into the text box. To see how your document will look online, use the Preview link to view it. If you do bring up the preview, you will eventually want to click on Hide Preview to return to editing your document.
Whichever way your choose to create and edit your document, you have three options to end your session. The first and worst of these is, by whatever means you use, to abruptly exit this page. As this will yield unpredictable results— e.g., you might lose all or a good part of your work— this is not recommended. A second and much preferable end to your editing session is to click on the big, orange PUBLISH POST button below the text box. This will put your document onto the website and bring you back to the Dashboard. The third option is to click the blue SAVE NOW button right next to the previously mentioned PUBLISH POST button. Saving your work in this way, stores what Blogger calls a draft of your work, a copy of it stored on Blogger but not posted to the website. After saving a draft of your work, you can safely log out, close your browser if you wish, and then come back to resume editing and formatting at a later time.
Labels
Any time while you are composing or editing or formatting your document on Blogger, and independent of how you do any of these, you can apply one or more labels to your document. Labels are completely optional but, as we'll see, are quite important. Look at what the visitor sees at the top of the left column and you'll see a small header entitled Keywords with several such keywords below it with numbers in parentheses alongside each of them. What the website shows as Keywords are the aggregate of all the labels for all the website's documents. The number in parentheses alongside each keyword represents the number of documents with that label. The Keywords listing will change automatically when you apply one or more labels to your posted document.
The purpose of the Keywords listing is to assist visitors to our site in locating the kind of document they are looking for, e.g., poems, short stories, essays, fiction, nonfiction, etc. You can apply already listed labels to your document, but you can also create your own. As with virtually every other aspect of your website postings, you can always come back later and add, change, or delete one or more or all of your labels.
Applying labels to your document is easy. On the same webpage where you paste (or compose) your article, at the bottom of the text box, you'll see the words Labels for this post and a small text entry box to the right of it. Simply type in the labels you want into this small text box. As you type, Blogger will read what you are typing and, if it resembles a previously existing label, Blogger will display the already-existing label; click on this displayed label and it will be inserted for you into the text box. To specify multiple labels, separate them with commas. As with the rest of your document, and the Title and Link fields, labels will be saved and appear in the draft version of your document if, instead of publishing your post, you save it as a draft.
Post Options
At the bottom of text composition box there's a text link which says Post Options. Clicking on this brings up a small menu where three items can be configured: Reader Comments, Backlinks, and Post date and time.
Reader Comments
Sometimes— probably most of the time— there are readers of a website who would like to comment on what you've written. Some web publishers permit comments, some don't. Here's where— well, one of the places— you can set the permissions for comments. You can also approve or reject visitors' comments individually and even have Blogger send you an email when someone has posted a comment on any of your articles. (To set all the possible options for Reader Comments and how they are handled, click on the Settings tab and then on Comments.) Generally it's a good idea to permit your readers to make comments. Like just about everything here, you can always change this setting later.
Backlinks
It can happen that someone likes your contribution to the web so much that they want to link to it, i.e., they put a link on their website which, when clicked, takes their visitor to your article. If you wish, you can show these links from other sites by checking the radio button here to allow backlinks. Any such backlinks will appear on the website below your post after the text link Links to this post.
Post date and time
When you first create your post, it is time-stamped; that is, the date and time is recorded. When your finished article appears on the website, this date and time is shown at the very top of your post. If you wish, you can change that date and time here.
Basics of HTML
Software for composing your document
Because we're posting to the web and the web uses the markup language called HTML, you'll need to format your document— your article or essay, poem, screenplay, novel chapter, short story, whatever— in HTML. So unless you've already been using HTML, you probably won't be creating the document you contribute to the web in the same way that you routinely create other documents. In my experience, Microsoft's Word doesn't do HTML very well. I generally recommend that people download and install an open and free editor called emacs. Emacs is a quite powerful editor and adapts well to a wide variety of uses, including creating clean and readable and standards-compliant HTML documents. But there are dozens of other software options for writing in HTML and you're free to use whatever text editor you wish. Just be forewarned that many editors and text processors create files with text you didn't type in and which you may not want, characters commonly referred to as "garbage characters". The easiest way to avoid getting garbage characters into your document is not to use editors or text processors which put them in.
Before composing: Test your editor
Note: If you already know that your editor or text processor produces good HTML, you can skip down to the next section.
To see if your editing software is inserting unwanted garbage characters into your document on a Windows™ system, locate your HTML file with Search, open a Command Prompt window (normally found in Start, Programs, Accessories, Command Prompt) and enter the command:
replacing, of course,
If you want to try this this right now but you don't already have an
HTML-formatted document, cut-and-paste the block of text in blue below
into a file and save it. Using the Windows
file://c:/path/to/file.html
again, replacing \path\to\ with the subdirectory path to your particular file, and file.html with the name you chose for your HTML file. You will need to prepend this with the HTML specification file:// and, as shown, change all the backslash-characters (\) in your path to forward-slashes (/). Also note that we've avoided the use of any space characters in these path and file names.
Now take a close look at the text displayed in your browser. If it looks good, then it probably is good. If you're using the file copied-and-pasted from the blue block below, then the text in your browser should look pretty much like that in the yellow block a little further below. A notable exception will be where the lines break. In all likelihood where each line begins in the web document you just created will be different how it looks in the yellow block. Read the paragraph in the blue block about "whitespace" to understand what's going on there. But other than where the lines break, your file should be identical to the yellow block. If it's not, you've got a problem which needs to be fixed before you can go on to web authoring.
HTML: What it looks like and what it does
A bit below in the blue block is a simple HTML file, showing some basic HTML code. HTML consists of "tags" which enhance the appearance and readability of the document as it appears in your browser. A little below the blue block is a yellow block that shows how the text and tags inside blue block are rendered by your browser. If you compare the text in the blue block with that in the yellow block, you'll notice that you don't see any of the HTML tags in the yellow block, but instead you see effects they have on the text.
One important tag (actually, a pair of tags) defines the beginning and end of a paragraph. In the blue block you'll see that each paragraph begins and ends with <p> and </p> respectively. These are paragraphs tags and they mark the begin and end of each paragraph. In general, an HTML tag consists of the less-than sign (<) and the greater-than sign (>) and some text in between them. The text between them specifies what kind of markup that HTML tag does. In the case of paragraph tags the text of the tag is simply a 'p' character. The second, or closing, tag is generally the same as the first, or opening, tag except that a slash character (/) follows the less-than character (<). Note where the paragraph tags are in the blue block and then notice that, although there may be blank lines between the opening and closing paragraph tags (<p> and </p>), these blank lines don't appear in the rendered HTML (seen in the yellow block).
Here's a table showing a few of the most common HTML tags:
| Opening tag | Closing tag | Markup performed |
|---|---|---|
| <p> | </p> | Designates the begin and end of a paragraph. |
| <i> | </i> | Italicizes enclosed text. |
| <b> | </b> | Makes the enclosed text boldface. |
| <br /> | N/A | Line break. Begins a new line. Note that no closing tag is needed. |
| <blockquote> | </blockquote> | Encloses a long quotation, one which appears separated by blank lines above and below it and which is indented on the left and right. |
| <pre> | </pre> | Preserves the formatting which you type in. This is useful when you want to display, say, a scientific formula or other text which you don't want your browser to squeeze the whitespace out of. |
| <!-- | --> | Comment tags. Any text within these will not appear in the browser-rendered version of your document. These are handy to make notes to yourself which you don't want to be seen in your document as it's viewed in a web browser. |
| — | N/A | This isn't an HTML tag per se. The technical term for it is a "character entity" and it's just one of many available in HTML. The — code is how you put an em dash (—) into your document. |
| <h2> | </h2> | The header tag is used to mark text which is the title of a section of your text. Text within a header tag is made bold and offset from text above and below it by blank lines. |
| <h3> | </h3> | This is another header tag. Its text will appear smaller than that inside the h2 tags, but larger than the text within h4 tags. |
| <body> | </body> | Encloses the entire body of the viewable document. The Blogger software inserts these tags automatically, so the document you post to the website should not contain them. What you post (e.g., copy-and-paste) into Blogger will contain all the text between these tags. |
| <html> | </html> | These tags enclose the whole of an HTML document. While you should use them in HTML documents you create and view on your own computer, leave them out of what you upload to Blogger. |
To see how some of the above HTML code actually functions, have a look at the block of text in blue below. Here you can see the actual HTML tags as you would type them into your document. Below the blue block is a yellow block which shows how this HTML-formatted text appears in your web browser.
When viewed in a web browser, the HTML code in blue above will look like what you see in yellow below. As you'll note, most of the text remains pretty much the same. The HTML code, however, contains "tags" which are demarcated by the less-than and greater-than signs (< and >). These tags tell the browser how to render your text, e.g., to italicize parts of it, to begin and end a paragraph, to make some text larger as for section titles, etc. The whole of the HTML code is marked by the tags <html> and </html>. Though every valid HTML document must be demarcated by these, Blogger puts these into every webpage automatically and so you don't have to include these in the document you create for this website. In fact, if you're cutting and pasting from an HTML document you created offline, paste only that HTML code between the <body> and </body> tags.
This is an H3 Header
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. "Marking up" is what you do to a document to format it for readability. Formatting includes making text bold or italicizing it, arranging text into paragraphs, inserting section titles, or headers, of various sizes, indenting text, and so forth.
Note the markup of bold and italics in the paragraph above. Note also that tags come in pairs, one to mark the beginning of the marked up text and another to mark the end of that text. Here, in our very basic HTML, the end tags are identical to the beginning tags except for the slash (/) inserted.
Here begins the third paragraph. As with the other HTML tags, you can see the paragraph tags marking the begin and end of the paragraphs in the HTML code (with the blue background) but not in the browser-rendered version (with the yellow background). You should also note that it doesn't really matter where the paragraph tags are placed. This is due to the way HTML handles "whitespace".
"Whitespace" refers to characters which normally show as spaces, Tab characters, and empty lines. In HTML whitespace is taken out when your browser renders HTML code into the webpage you see. This means that if you put lots of space characters into your document, they will be reduced to just a single space in your rendered HTML document. Though there's a number of empty line above in the HTML code, your browser renders them out, so these lines all appear as part of the same paragraph. While you're free to put just about any whitespace you want to into your document— and this may be useful to do at times—, for readability's sake, it's probably best to make your paragraphs look like paragraphs, even in the HTML version of your document.
If you want to start some text on a new line
(e.g., for a poem)
use the "break" tag.
Like the paragraph tag, within the
HTML code, the break tag can be at the beginning of a line, in the
middle or a line, or at the end of a line. It doesn't matter.
The
new line will begin right after it.
The break tag is one of the
very few HTML tags which doesn't have a corresponding end tag, which is
why it contains the penultimate slash character.
Above the first paragraph is the markup for a "header", the sort of text which marks the beginning of a section within a document. In HTML a header can have various sizes, The H1 header is the largest; H2 is smaller; H3 is smaller yet.
This is an H5 Header
This and other such headers are typically used to designate the title of an HTML document and any titles of sections and subsections of your document. Header tags range from h1 to h5, h1 being the largest (generally the document's title) and h5 being the smallest. Because in Blogger you specify the document title in the menu described above, you shouldn't need do it again using the h1 tag.