critters.org

In my last post, I talked about revising my novel, Razor Mountain, and I mentioned that I was using Critters.org to get some feedback on the early chapters. I was sure that I had talked about Critters previously, in my “reference desk” series about useful tools for writers, but when I went back and looked through old posts, I was shocked to discover that there was no such post. Today, I’m going to remedy that.

Online Critique

I’ve written on a couple occasions about getting reader feedback and why it’s valuable. I think most writers will naturally understand the value of beta readers, editors, and improving writing through several drafts. Revisions without feedback are needlessly hobbled.

However, there’s more than one way to get feedback. An online critique group like Critters has some disadvantages: you won’t necessarily know everyone, and you aren’t engaging with readers face-to-face. You also don’t get to pick your readers, so the feedback may not be quite as tailored as a traditional writing group.

So why use an online critique group? Well, there are some advantages too. Online critique can be asynchronous, making it easier to avoid scheduling issues, and lower-pressure. Feedback is written out, which gives you a useful artifact that you can save and consult as needed during revisions. Since the group is less formal and doesn’t meet in the real world, people can come in and out according to their personal situations. In short, an online group like Critters is less formal than many in-person groups, which can be a good or bad thing.

Critters.org (and its pseudonym Critique.org) is an online writing workshop that has been around since 1995, with over 300,000 critiques in that time. The main, original workshop group is focused on speculative fiction: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. Since its inception, it has expanded to 17 different workshops covering most genres of fiction, mainstream and literary fiction, and other media such as comics, film, music, photography and more.

Critters is free to use, and always has been, surviving on goodwill donations. It is not exactly a svelte, modern, or flashy website. It still looks and functions a bit like a website from the 1990s—mostly text and links and a big top menu with dozens of pages. It is still maintained by the original founder, Andrew Burt, and a host of minion programs he has created. As a programmer, I feel right at home. For non-programmer writers, I imagine it’s a little bit off-putting.

The mechanics of critique are simple. Members can submit a manuscript via webpage or email by filling out some information and attaching their work. These pieces go into a queue, and each week a dozen or so are “released” to the group. Members then submit their critiques via webpage or email, and those critiques are forwarded to the authors.

To ensure that everyone gets good feedback, critiques must fulfill a minimum length (a paltry 200 words), and any member who wants their work sent out in the queue must submit a critique 75% of the time, or 3 out of every 4 weeks.

Cultivating Culture

A distributed group like this lives or dies by its culture. Plenty of message boards and chat rooms have fallen by the wayside because they didn’t moderate effectively, and became cesspools of hate speech and trolling. Critters has survived so long and continues to be successful because it has developed a culture of respectful and honest feedback.

When signing up for the group, new members are directed to several articles on the site about diplomatic language and effective critique. Authors are also warned that honest feedback can be hard to hear, and that some critiques are well-intentioned, but a little more blunt than you might like.

Members submitting critiques are also required to check a box stating that they have been diplomatic, which is obviously not hard for the malicious to overcome, but serves as a good reminder for those who are acting in good faith.

Of course, like any effective moderation policy, there are ways to escalate bigger issues. I’m sure there have been trolls in the past, but I suspect that Critters has the advantage of being a bit of a dusty niche of the internet, where troublemakers aren’t common and most people are putting forth some effort in order to improve their skills and their work.

My experience has been extremely positive. I have never had any outright problematic critiques, and I could count the number of overly-blunt or tone-deaf critiques on one hand. (Honestly, an occasional rough critique is probably good practice for being in this industry.)

Details

There are a few interesting little details about Critters that aren’t necessarily apparent unless you read through all the documentation up-front.

Partial Credits

Normally, an author submits a story and anyone who provides a critique of the minimum (200 word) length gets credit for participation that week, counting toward the 75% rule. However, if the story is short—under 2000 words—then any critiques will only count for half-credit. This is to encourage readers to critique longer stories, and not just focus on these quick reads. A half-credit does not count toward the 75% ratio until you’ve done two of them.

Critique Counts

It’s possible to see the current number of critiques submitted for each manuscript in the current week. These counts are updated in almost real time. Critters’ weeks run from Wednesday to Wednesday, and a lot of critiques come in over the weekend, so I like to look at the counts before I pick a story for critique. Sometimes one or two manuscripts will have very low counts, so I like to help those folks out. If someone already has 15 critiques, what are the odds that I’m going to be repeating things someone else has already pointed out?

In general, novel chapters get fewer critiques than complete stories, and longer stories get fewer critiques than shorter ones. So, you’re likely to get the most out of Critters if you write a lot of flash fiction, and considerably less if you write novels with long chapters.

RFDRs

RFDRs, or “Requests for Dedicated Readers” are submissions for novels, where the author is requesting volunteers to read the entire book and provide feedback. RFDRs often include chapters of the book, and anyone can still submit a critique for the submitted portion without signing up to read the whole book.

If a reader accepts an RFDR, they contact the author outside of Critters, typically by email, and coordinate the process. Because reading a whole novel is a big ask, completing an RFDR is worth one credit for every 5000 words of the book. So an 80,000-word novel, fully critiqued, would be worth 16 individual critiques! However, if the RFDR agreement is for the whole book, then the reader has to complete the whole thing to get credit. If they give up partway through, it’s up to the author whether they’ll still give credit for the work that was done.

My limited experience is that there are a lot of novels on Critters (about half of all submissions), and not very many people interested in RFDRs. This limits how much an author can get out of critique for a novel, since it takes a long time to send an entire novel through the queue, one or two chapters at a time, and not all readers will have read previous chapters to understand the full context.

Resets

The 75% participation ratio can be daunting, especially if you’re not used to critiquing. It’s easy to miss a couple weeks and fall behind.

I have been a member of Critters for years, but not continuously. I’ve taken months or years off, which will decimate the participation ratio. Luckily, this is a common issue. If you need to take time away, or you fall hopelessly behind, you can submit a request to have your participation ratio reset. You then only need to start submitting a critique each week to be back in good standing and have your work go out in the queue.

Giving and Receiving

Finally, I’ll reiterate something I mentioned on Twitter recently. It’s extremely useful to get feedback on a work in progress, but it’s equally valuable to critique the work of other authors. It’s practice for editing your own work with an unbiased eye. I have discovered problems in my own writing that were only apparent after I wrote critiques of other people’s stories. Sometimes it’s just easier to see an issue in someone else’s work than in your own.

Try It!

If you have a hard time getting a writing group together in the real world, or you simply prefer a less social, asynchronous, or easier-to-schedule option, Critters is a fantastic alternative. I’ve been using it for years, and there are plenty of professional and published authors who are members.

If you’re on the fence, I’d encourage you to give it a try. It’s as simple as submitting a story and doing a few critiques. You’ll likely get feedback from 5-20 people, and you can evaluate the quality for yourself.

After taking a couple weeks off, I’m jumping into revisions on Razor Mountain.

Having done my best to forget everything about the book, I now have to identify all the parts that suck and make them better.

Critique

To get in the editing mindset, I reactivated my account on critters.org, and I’ve been doing critiques on other people’s stories. This is great practice for editing, because I want to approach my own stories in the same way that I’d approach someone else’s: as an objective reader.

The other reason that I’ve been critiquing is because I sent in the first chapter of Razor Mountain for critique. Critters keeps the whole system running by requiring everyone to submit a critique in 3 out of every 4 weeks if they want to send out their own work for feedback.

Critters also has an option to request “dedicated readers,” which flags your submission to say that you’re interested in having people read the whole novel. Unfortunately, about six submissions in a given week are novels, and I don’t think these requests tend to get much traction. It’s a lot to ask of semi-random strangers, even if they do get a bunch of reading credits for it. I haven’t gotten any takers so far.

I’ll be sending the second chapter through in the next couple days, but I haven’t decided how many more chapters to put in the queue. I suspect I’ll see diminishing returns on later chapters. Novel chapters don’t get as much feedback as short stories, and not all the readers will be following chapter by chapter, so the feedback is less useful.

The other problem is that it takes a couple weeks for a submission to reach the top of the queue, and each user only gets one submission at a time. At that rate, it’d take a year or more to get through the whole book.

The Editing Plan

I posted recently about making a novel editing plan, and I’m now doing that for Razor Mountain. I’m looking for big structural changes I might want to make, and trying not to get bogged down in small changes. This is always hard for me, because tweaking words and sentences is easy and satisfying right away. It’s much harder to see possible improvements at the chapter or multi-chapter level, and it’s harder to let the ego go and try a bigger rewrite when the story feels “finished” and set in stone. Even if it will result in a better story.

The only place where I have been purposely doing smaller edits is in the first couple of chapters, because I know I’ll be submitting those to Critters, and I want them presented in as much of a polished state as possible. I’m working under the assumption that better chapters will garner more useful feedback. Of course, the Critters feedback includes plenty of suggestions for low-level improvements, but I’m mostly tucking those away for use in later revisions.

Once I’ve made the big, structural edits, I’ll pass the book to a couple of real-life readers for more feedback. I’ll give them the guidance I outlined in my post about asking for critique. Then I can finally start looking at the smaller edits, cleanup and polishing. At which point I should be on my millionth read-through and ready to never look at the book again.

Making a List, Checking it Quite a Lot, Actually

To quiet down the part of my mind that wants to do little line edits, I’ve been compiling a running list of smaller things to go back and improve when the big edits are done. It’s going to be a long list by the time I finish rereading the entire book. So far, it’s things like this:

Danger Words: I tend to overuse words like felt, seemed, mostly, some, nearly, almost, a bit, like, might
Overused Punctuation: em-dash, colons, semicolons, parentheticals
Overused Names: Don’t use a proper name when a pronoun would be just as clear
References to “artifacts”: I originally thought God-Speaker would get his power from some objects that he found in the mountain, but then they morphed into the voices. I’m not certain all the references got updated.
Adjectives and adverbs: They’re not strictly poison, as some writers would claim, but they had better pull their weight if they don’t want to get cut.

More to Come

I’m still not exactly sure how to structure these posts. It’s a lot harder for me to talk constructively about editing than it is to talk about coming up with ideas or writing the first draft. But I think editing is probably not discussed as often as it should be, since most first drafts tend to be pretty flawed, and it’s the revising that makes those mediocre drafts into excellent books.

For now, I’ll continue editing, and post again when something comes up that’s worth talking about.

Tag: critters.org

Reference Desk #19 — Critters