Hi everyone, I’m looking for some advice as to when I should start putting up some of my work for review. I am 10,000 words into my novel, I was going to wait until I had the outline of the entire novel done before posting excerpts but I know some of you post your work as you go. The thing is, as with most novels, it’s changing as I go, so I didn’t want to post the first chapter only to have the whole thing change somewhere along the line. What do you think? What do you do? Many thanks.
Maybe you could post, in the Novel forum, 800-1200 words of the section you're having the most difficulty with. Or you feel needs the most work. After your two reviews of course. gar
In my case I began posting pieces of my novel almost right away when I was only a few chapters ahead of the first that I posted. It worked out well for me because even though I have made a ton of changes since then, posting my work helped me to recognize and understand where I needed work. Because my flaws were spelled out by a number of helpful reviewers, I can write more fluidly now and recognize my own shortcomings without immediately asking for help. When I feel I reach a new roof, I'll probably post again.
Depends whether you're looking for general feedback, an opinion on style, or needing to have a particular problem analysed. It can be equally helpful to read other reviews, as well as critiquing some you see as having similar problems to your own. As I said, it depends what you're looking for. Whatever you do, I'd advise against posting too much, using feedback from your posted example on the rest of your work. Good luck with it.
hardest thing is to let go of a piece you are writing. i'd say as suggested, post a a chapter or so, give the people a taste, see if there are any holes that need filling before you go too far. reviews are reviews only, not laws, but there are a lot of people with good advice on this site, its a tool one shouldn't hesitate to use. good writing to you
If you plan to submiti it for publication, don't post more than a short excerpt at all. Whatever you do decide to post, make it a passage you either feel is your very best writing, or a scene or two that you find you are really struggling with. Make the best job of it you possibly can, and clean up the SPaG to the best of your ability. The benefit of posting what you are struggling with is obvious. Posting your best sample, though, will benefit you when people rip it apart and exhume your worst writing habits - the ones you never noticed you do. The purpose is not to fix your novel and have other people tell you how to pull it all together. If you can improve your writing techniques and establish you own "voice", most of the rest will come together on its own, and with experience. Most writers already know what story they want to tell. The difficulty comes in how to tell the story in a way that holds the reader's interest. Most of that can be seen in small excerpts, and what takes place in those short excerpts IS scalable to the level of the overall story. So when should you post for critique? When you have a piece that you really feel is at the top of your game. Whan you have a piece that, no matter what you do, frustrates the hell out of you, and you need some fresh ways to attack it. When you have tried an experimental approach, and want to know if there is more you can do with it, or whether it was just an awful idea. Naturally, I'm assuming you have already been exercising your critiquing skills, and have turned that critical eye back toward your own work. That is, of course, most of why we have a reviewing requirement.
