Guest Blogger - Matt

First and foremost let me say this.  What happened today in Boston was horrific and may never really be truly understood.

I grieve for the victims of the bombings today at the Marathon's finish line, and I await the day the perpetrator of this heinous act is brought to justice.



Tonight I had an appointment that left little time for me to write a blog entry myself.  I asked my friend Matt, who was the subject of last week's post, to write up a little something to keep the momentum going.

So without further ado, I give you Matt.


Let me open with a clarification: I am not Jess. I’m her friend Matt. I’m three days younger, several dozen pounds heavier, and have no internal filter to speak of. You have my sincere apologies in advance.

Jess reached out to me this morning and asked if I’d mind throwing together a ‘Guest Blog’ for tonight, as her dance card was full up for the day, and she wasn’t going to be able to find the time to write her regularly scheduled blog. I took a look at my own brimming schedule for the day, then shrugged and said “The hell with it. Sure.”

I spent some time thinking about some different topics that might be interesting to ramble on about… Writing with Internet ADD… Novels vs Short Stories… The Catch-22 around Agent Desires and Publisher Desires…. But in the end, I decided to basically write a ‘Mirror Post’ to what Jess put up last week – Peer Reviews.

In my opinion, Peer Reviews are incredibly difficult to do properly, because it’s a two person process. Obviously, the person giving the review needs to do things a certain fashion, so that they’re providing good feedback without harping on the minuscule or otherwise tearing the piece to shreds, but just as importantly, the one receiving the feedback needs to have the correct mindset for it.

Last week, Jess hit on some of the emotions that go into letting someone else look at your work… it’s more or less stark, nail-biting, terror. Odds are you’ve worked your ass off writing something and have potentially spent hours on that one section once you start doing revisions. Additionally, there’s a good possibility that you’re completely convinced you might have written trite garbage that no one will ever want to read, and you should probably quit and go take up a different hobby where nobody will judge your work. So handing that piece of work to someone else takes no small amount of guts (and probably a solid shot of liquor or two to steel the nerves).

I had the ‘easier’ role of the two last week… I sent Jess about a half dozen pages from a section of my short story that, frankly, I hated. It was a necessary part of the story, but I just didn’t like what I’d done there (so much so that I’ve decided to shelve that work for a couple weeks and focus on another piece, for submission to a different Anthology. That’s how self-confident I am over what I’d written). Jess came back with some good pieces of feedback, and said that, overall, she didn’t think it was half bad… that definitely helped bolster my confidence a bit… perhaps I wasn’t writing COMPLETE Garbage… at least, there was a chance some of it could be redeemed.

This week, we changed roles a little bit… I reached out to Jess for a couple “What do you think about the formatting of this line…?” questions, and in turn, she sent me the first half of her Prologue to peek at.

At this point, it becomes very obvious to me that, while receiving criticism over your ‘baby’ is hard enough, they should, and probably do, teach college level courses on giving critiques. They’re incredibly hard for me, and I’ll tell you why…

I am the Grammar Police. Stick ‘em up.

If it wasn’t for the fact that I don’t know a ‘dangling participle’ from my own elbow, I’d probably be a good copy editor, as the QA side of my brain has trained me to catch every silly little formatting issue. Spelling errors, punctuation failures, sentences that seem out of order… but for the level of Peer Review we’re doing, I know that Jess doesn’t give a damn. She’s handing me a piece that hasn’t undergone revision, and will be looking through it all again long before submitting it to a publisher. She doesn’t need copy editing, she needs feedback. The other thing she doesn’t need is someone to look at a paragraph and say “You know, here’s how I’d have done it.” – I’m not writing her story, she is. How she wants to use a turn of phrase is up to her, and dictated by her style.

So I turn off the part of my brain that’s looking at the little things, and instead look at the big picture and try and get some feedback for her… I let her know that I think she’s got a good opener… here are a few excellent hooks that caught my attention, and would keep me flipping pages… I like how this piece here is written… and so on. I briefly mention that I noticed some technical flaws that I think a pass of revision will clear up, but don’t harp on them because I want to make sure she’s getting the positive feedback that she’s not off course. Her ship is on the right heading, she just needs to tighten the rigging as it were.

Now, earmuffs kiddies, this isn’t to say that feedback should be a big circle-jerk where it’s all rainbows and smiles. It just turns out she sent me a piece I felt was good. It would have been even harder for me if she gave me something that had real flaws in it, because I’d still need to give her solid feedback in terms of “I don’t understand this character’s motivations…” and “…why bother doing this when she could obviously just do this other thing with a fraction of the difficulty?”, but would need to do it in a constructive manner, that didn’t come across in a way that would depress her… because then I’m not only not helping her process, I’m harming it by sucking away her motivation.

Done correctly, Peer Review is an incredibly powerful tool if you’ve got the right people helping you out. You’ll be able to see things from a reader’s point of view… get a second opinion when you’re wavering on a particular formatting method or story idea… and can generally make sure you’re not heading down a dead branch. The caveat is just that you need to make sure you’ve got the right people helping you out, so you’re gaining, rather than losing, motivation every time you hand a piece out.