Critique is NOT Criticism!

For years I resisted being in a critique group! Having been an editor and writer for curriculum and library publications I’d had had too much Really Good Stuff that got scraped by some opinionated person with a fancier chair. Plus I have enough form rejection letters to paper the office and a bathroom. Why would I voluntarily seek more criticism?
Then I found this definition of “critique”: One-one-one or group constructive feedback session in the form of a collaborative analysis of a design or issue integrated with brainstorming alternate solutions. And on a trip to Mayslake in Oakbrook I found a 6 week series of “critique sessions” led by author Carmela Martino. Armed with picture books of a dandelion and a wingless dragon, I signed up.

The first night was scary, but her ground rules were reassuring. We only responded to a class member’s story with positive statements and questions. Hardest of all was sitting silently while others talked! But after the first round, it was not “criticism” but real “critique” and helpful! (FYI: Carmela is beginning a new series of critique sessions soon. Children’s Writers Critique Class at http://mayslakepeabody.com/content/)
We 6 Blog Buds went through two sessions with Carmela before we started meeting on our own. Of course friendships have developed that ignore any life differences! I think the greatest benefit I get is the idea generation when I am stuck. If a character needs more definition or the ending is incomplete, they will spend time with me brainstorming how to make it better. Then they are treated to the rewrite the next month and end up wanting stuffed toys of all my animal characters!

Who Are My Characters?

I think most of my main characters (whether they are animals in a picture books or teenagers in YA fiction) share a common trait. They are outsiders. Sometimes they are trying to fit in, other times, they just want to be left to their own devices; but in the end they have to stay true to who they are. I believe I'm drawn to this character model, because as a kid I was always just a little too shy, and extremely awkward. Most times, my characters share personality traits of people I know, including myself; but none of them are based on one person.

Although I agree with Monta and Trager, that a characters physical appearance is secondary to their personality, I love it when I can close my eyes and picture the character I'm creating. It helps me feel that I know them a little better. In my YA fantasy novel, my main character is a biracial teenage girl (AA/ Caucasian). Since I don't have a daughter, I image her looking like a teenaged female version of my older son. Brown curly hair, copper colored eyes, tall. Personality wise, she is insecure and awkward. Her abilities cause her emotional angst, but one day, she will learn to use them to her advantage. When I image her, I think of inner and outer traits that comprise a whole being.

The personality of my characters depend on the story I want to tell. I ask myself, how do my characters fit in the world around them? When determining the race of my characters, there's always an internal debate. I have two concerns: one is that if my characters are African American, they may not appeal to a larger audience; the other concern is I don't want to feel that because I'm African American my main characters must always be African American.

Despite these concerns, it is more important to me that my reader is able to relate to my characters. For a little while, I would like my reader to become the person I have created. They should be able to close there eyes and picture the character as I can. If that happens, I have achieved what I have set out to do.

En-hear-ening characters

Envisioning my characters--is there an equivalent, like “en-hear-ening” them? I think I am at least as audio as visual. In imagining my characters in YA/adult, I have them quite physically defined in my mind, and I very often picture actors in my head or even people from works of art if I am actively writing that particular story. If I am just jotting down ideas or writing paragraphs of an outline for a story, I’m focused on theme and plot and have only the vaguest ideas about what characters look like. It would be unusual for an image of a person to come so clearly to me that I build a whole story around that image. For me, their personalities are stronger than appearance. I start out with my ideas of the personality and as I write or scenes come into my head, their personalities grow and choices they make change from what I had originally imagined. I am one of those people whose characters do speak to them--whole scenes of dialogue. So I have a good idea of what they would say, how they would say it, motivation, and how it propels the story forward.

Since I listen to a lot of music, many of my characters become characters in songs relevant to the story, or songs remind me of certain characters, which helps me be more specific in their personalities and motivations. Even if it’s never mentioned in the narrative, I would know what kinds of music they liked. That can be really fun if you have a creature who has lived longer than a normal human lifetime--tv and movies and internet have not always been around, books were not always widely available to everyone, but music has always been accessible and create-able.

News events also influence my characters--stories that come up, elections won and lost, medical advances, scientific discoveries--would these impact my characters? How would they feel about them? Sometimes a discovery is made about a historical event from centuries past--that may become something that one of my characters actually lived through. Last week, sadly, singer/songwriter/musician Alex Chilton suddenly passed away. My young protagonist would have no idea who that is, but perhaps her older (obviously cool) relative or her vampire friend who has been around “a while” would react to that.

Picture book characters are different for me. I picture animal characters more vividly than I do if the characters are people. I usually do not have strong visuals in my head of my child protagonists. My imagination focuses much more on their personalities, and I like them to be feisty! There is one story, about Mother’s Day and a little boy named Noodles, in which I couldn’t help picturing my own son as I was writing it. I think I was having a really difficult time coming up with something to write at that time, so thinking about him and that topic helped me persevere. But most of the time I am more inclined to picture the settings and action around my characters than their personal appearances. I have only vague images of what my vampire or witch families look like--whimsical, a couple people are only slightly foreboding--and more defined ideas about the drafty old cobwebb-y castle. When Marisol moves, the text is used to describe her new room, new house, new school, new playground. In my mind, the physical appearance of Marisol and her family members is quite fluid. If the stories were ever illustrated, it should be a pleasant surprise to me to see what the PB characters actually look like!

“Children by the million wait for Alex Chilton when he comes ‘round. They say ‘I’m in love. What’s that song?’”--the Replacements, off Pleased to Meet Me, 1987