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What's Wrong With My Story?

Jean Currie

This article first appeared in Writers' Forum

Have your stories been rejected and you can find nothing wrong with them? In desperation you turn to a group where members critique one another's work and what do you find? The feedback doesn't help. You expect a quick-fix answer and instead you get random, rambling or contradictory comments.

David tells you it is too long. Pat says it is too short. Susan says she doesn't know what sort of clothes the child's mother wears, whether she is smart or sloppy. Vicky says the woman is lucky; she may be single with a small child but she has a job and a mother to look after her daughter. What kind of job is it though? Full or part time? Why can't she take the child to school on her way to work? You have no grandchildren, so Sandra doesn't know why you should think you can write stories about little girls. Jane, a retired English teacher, criticises sentence structure and grammar and her friend, Elizabeth, not wanting to be left out, tells you that you have three paragraphs beginning with the same word.

And so it goes on. None of them seem to have anything helpful to say and by the time Jonathan, the poet, says he never reads short stories and he doesn't know why you waste time writing them, you are ready to scream.

When that happened to me, I resolved not to ask anyone again. Hopeless, they were. OK, they were all expressing personal opinions, but not one of them had talked about my story, only the one they thought I should write.

I felt thoroughly depressed. There was no point in being a member of a group if they couldn't tell me where I was going wrong. I mentally reviewed what each one had said.

Maybe it *was* too long. It was the required length for the magazine I had aimed at, but perhaps it seemed drawn out because I had used too many words in the wrong place. They weren't moving the plot along.

Others besides Vicky and Sandra had talked about the child's mother. Why? She was a minor character. The story was about the child and the way she behaved when she was with her Granny. They must be telling me they either wanted more of the mother or less. She could go. The schoolteacher too.

And what about Granddad? He did little more than watch football on TV and escape to his garden for a little peace, but he was important as the child's confidante. Granny's too.

As I considered what each had said, I realised that it was not the actual comments that mattered. It was what lay behind them and what I did with them. It was up to me to work on them, sort them out, make sense of them. There was no such thing as a quick fix. It was my story and I had to put it right. The help they had given me was to make me think on different lines.

Critiquing is a skill and it has to be learnt. All who comment do so from their own standpoint - like the poet who believed writing short stories was a waste of time. Peter writes horror and demands more action. Mary wants emotion and Sally stresses characterisation. Others can say no more than that they like or don't like the story, without being able to offer any reasons. You may become outraged by some of the
comments but if they make you see things differently and work on other lines, they are valuable.

And there is a bonus. You can see faults in others' work more easily than in your own and by critiquing in your turn, you can help yourself as well as someone else. You learn the skill and turn it to your own writing.

The key is to take on board what is intended, what the basic conflict is and between whom, and what is the reason for the characters' - and therefore the story's - existence. If you can condense a story to one sentence it is easy to see where it should go. If you can't, it probably means there is too much waffle clouding the basic objectives.

Because Granny, in my story, had suffered when she went to school wearing glasses, she was worried about the little girl's first day at school. Reducing it to that made me realise which characters were important, which could be discarded and which was the viewpoint The story sold immediately.

If you have a group who can give you a kick-start, fine, but don't expect them to do it all. It's your story and you have to work at it to make it saleable. That's the way you will learn so that you don't make the same mistakes again.