The Critique Group Prime Directive

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In two weeks, I’ll be a panelist at Sleuthfest, the annual conference of the Mystery Writers of America Florida chapter. I’m excited to discuss one of my favorite topics: critique groups. When I was asked to be on the panel, I started reflecting on what advice I would offer to writers trying to form or improve their groups. I had so many ideas that it was hard to know where to begin.

That same day at work, I was planning a retrospective session for one of my development teams, where we collaborate on how to improve our work and our work relationships. We always start these sessions by reminding ourselves of the “Retrospective Prime Directive:

“Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.” (–Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review)

The idea, of course, is to focus on improvement with empathy and critical thinking. It hit me that critique groups have a similar dynamic. Both critique groups and team retrospectives rely on open, honest communication, and both can only succeed when participants feel safe sharing feedback and trust that others have the same goal: improvement. Inspired, I created the Critique Group Prime Directive as the fundamental piece of advice for building effective critique groups:

“Regardless of what we read, we understand and truly believe that every writer brought their best effort to the page, given their knowledge, experience, and creative vision at the time. Our goal is to offer thoughtful, constructive feedback to help each other grow, while respecting the unique voice and intentions of each writer.”

At Sleuthfest, I’ll talk about the Prime Directive, alongside my fellow panelists who will offer practical advice for starting and sustaining successful critique groups. Sleuthfest is an amazing event for writers to improve their craft, and our chapter’s critique group program is an excellent way to connect with other writers. If you’re looking for a way to get the most out of peer feedback, this panel will give you the tools to build the best group possible.

And hey, it’s the only panel featuring me! (Okay, okay, maybe that’s not the draw I think it is.) There are many valuable sessions, but this one is unique because it focuses on connecting with other writers to collaboratively hone your craft. If you’re attending Sleuthfest, don’t miss the critique group panel.

I hope I’ll see you there!

It’s going slow, thanks for asking

Sam Falco

I haven’t posted a progress update on Gulf City Blues since late May, and there’s good reason. There hadn’t been any progress on Gulf City Blues since late May. Adapting to the new job is the biggest cause. At a month in, my calendar is already packed with more demands on my time every day. I have no brain power left for writing in the evenings, and there isn’t enough time in the morning before I have to log on. I don’t remember how I was managing this before I got laid off last year.

It’s not that I have written nothing since May. The challenge is that I don’t have sustained time for it. Maybe half an hour at a time. When I run into a problem spot, which I have with the current chapter, I need more than thirty minutes to work through it. Each day when I start, it takes ten to fifteen minutes to get my mind back into the story space, and the longer it goes on, the hard it is to stay focused.

I need to reclaim some time on the weekends. Summer in Florida comes with extra chores. The yard gets out of hand, the pool requires constant attention (its blue is currently tinged with pale green undertones), and you want to keep your eye on those roof drains lest too much water pond up. (Flat roofs are of the devil.) But surely I can find a few hours on Sunday afternoon to focus on fiction, can’t I?

Collaborating in Person

Sam Falco

I started a new job as an Agile Coach last month. Like my previous job, this one is work-from-home. But the company’s HQ is in Tampa, which gives me the opportunity to go to the office if I need to. Monday, my boss invited me to come in to meet the CFO. In turn, I asked a coworker if he would also come in so we could spend time collaborating in front of a whiteboard.

The Commute

The commute took longer than I like. Forty minutes in the morning, and that was with light traffic. The drive home featured heavier traffic, with many tense moments avoiding being rear-ended or side swiped by self-absorbed, aggressive drivers. I would hate to make that commute every day. At over ninety minutes for the round trip, that’s about ten percent of my waking day sitting in a vehicle.

A Productive Day in the Office

The time in the office, on the other hand, was productive and enjoyable. My coworker and I used to work together at another company, and I was happy to fall into our old pattern of building on each other’s thoughts. We’ve met via video conference several times in the past four weeks. But online collaboration is far inferior to being physically present with each other. We sketched out a plan to align portfolio-level planning with team-level planning that we’ve struggled to articulate for weeks via video conference sessions.

Digital Collaboration and its Disconnects

Online, I feel disconnected. Sure, I can see my collaboration partner, but it’s not the same. For one thing, we’re more likely to be looking at the digital whiteboard than each other. It’s awkward to know when to switch from “look at the board” to “look at the person.” In person, you’re always aware of each other’s presence. Shifting from “face the board” and “face the person” is immediate, seamless, and natural. My colleague and I often stood at three-quarter profile to each other so that we could see the board as well as each other.

Digital tools are also so much more cumbersome than a physical whiteboard. Digital tools require moving your hands from keyboard to mouse and back again. Then there’s the difficulty with jotting notes–you have to add a virtual sticky note, then type. Typing often produces more text than you can read without squinting or resizing. If you want to connect ideas, you have to switch tools (and input devices) to draw lines. Juggling physical and mechanical tools adds cognitive load, which diminishes the quality of thought.

The Benefits of a Physical Whiteboard

Writing with a marker on a physical whiteboard feels seamless. Jotting thoughts is easy and encourages brevity. Since your partner is right there, there’s no need to add detail; you can talk about it and move on. When you want to “yes, and” something, or connect two thoughts, you don’t have to change to a new tool. Simply draw the line without interrupting your mental process.

The Balance Between Remote and In-Person Work

I’m no advocate of mandatory return-to-office. Those policies are often reactionary attempts to reassert control over workers’ lives gussied up as concern for productivity. On the other hand, there is something to be said for being physically present with each other to collaborate. The more complex the problem you want to solve, the more valuable it becomes, because the barriers to focus presented by today’s online tools is considerable. I would hate to be forced to visit an office daily. But I like having the opportunity to meet my colleagues in-person when necessary to work together.

Featured Image by Kaleidico on Unsplash

Gulf City Progress

Sam Falco
It’s been six weeks since I started on the second draft of Gulf City Blues, my private-eye novel set in a fictional Florida city. I’ve since learned that there is a place in Florida called Gulf City. It’s an unincorporated community near Ruskin. I don’t think it’ll be a problem. The way I revise is to start a new, blank Word document and then import scenes as needed from the previous draft. I find it disheartening to delete material. It feels much better to add and watch the word count increase. Loss aversion is a thing, even in writing. In this revision, I’m adding much more new material than I am incorporating existing scenes. That’s because of what I discovered when I re-read the first draft and planned the story. I needed a red herring for my hero to chase, and I needed to make the two subplots more robust. And the scenes that I imported often needed revision as well as additions. The revision is now 33,013 words. It’s not a bad pace, considering that I have not been able to write every day. Some days, like this morning, I’ve thrown away the previous day’s work and written an entirely new scene. It feels slow but it’s also about as fast as I can expect to go. I’ve learned that I can only focus on fiction for a couple of hours a day, even if I have nothing else going on. That’s why I don’t expect to slow down when I start my new job next week. I’ll write before work, as I used to do before I was laid off. I’ll make progress that feels slow until I suddenly realize I’ve written another 30,000 words and I’m closing in on the end. More important than the word count is the feel of the story. Way back when I was in theater, I did some stage carpentry. If you built a platform, before you could say it was done, you had to jump on it. You had to prove that what you built was sturdy and wouldn’t collapse. If what I’ve written so far were a platform, I’d be happy to jump up and down on it. It’s good stuff.

Gulf City Blues Update

Sam Falco

I did not think it would take over a month to start wordsmithing of the second draft. Planning the revision was not that hard, but finding time to focus on it was. Looking for a new job is exhausting, demoralizing, and time-consuming. In between those activities, I’ve been teaching Professional Scrum classes. I’ve had enough students to make the classes worth teaching but not enough to believe I can stop looking for full-time work. I enjoy teaching very much, but two full-day classes plus preparation the day before and decompressing the day after can really distract from creative pursuits.

Nevertheless, the second draft is under way. I have a lot of new scenes to weave into the middle of the narrative. I can use the first four chapters almost as they are. That “almost” does a lot of heavy lifting, though. I’m changing the timeline and even though the change itself seems small, it requires moving the sequence of the early scenes. Doing that is harder than writing new material.

This is my process. I write a lot of words to discover the story, then throw away a lot that doesn’t align with my discovery. It’s true for almost everything I write. That’s one reason I rarely write business-related material. The effort far outweighs the reward.

I’m not even going to try to forecast when the second draft might be finished. It’ll be done when it’s done, however long that takes.

Gulf City Blues Revision Planning

Sam Falco

I started revising Gulf City Blues with a hands-off read-through of the existing manuscript. It was good!

For about 180 pages. Then the whole thing goes in the crapper with a bolted-on subplot that never makes any sense and isn’t resolved before the grand finale, which connects to the first 2/3 of the story and is satisfactory. That’s what I expected; I remembered how I struggled after about 55,000 words to figure out how to get to 80,000. Next time, I will remind myself that when the story is done, wrap it up and end it rather than forcing a word count.

What I didn’t expect was how good the first 2/3 would be. It’s engaging and fun, and sometimes I even forgot I was reading my own work. Where I have room for improvement is to give Mark a harder time getting information from people. There are a few witnesses who ought to send him away so that he can take a second run at them later. Some people not only give him information too easily, but they give him too much information. Mark ought to have to search a little harder. Since I need to cut almost 25,000 words from the end, I’m glad I see how I can broaden the scope of the story that works.

I’d like to move faster, but I picked up a few classes I wasn’t expecting to teach. Since one of them was a class I haven’t taught in almost two years, I wanted to make sure I gave my students my best effort. I sacrificed a little writing time to make that happen.

I still worked a little each day, though, and I’ll continue. I’m not pushing myself to finish by a specific date. I’d rather have a good second draft than a hastily completed, shoddy one.

Gulf City Blues Revision Stage One

Sam Falco

I finished the first draft of Gulf City Blues a month ago. I set every first draft aside for a while after I complete it. For previous stories, I’ve only taken a couple of weeks before I start revising but I’ve always been too close to the story when I return to it. This time, I resolved to spend a month letting the whole thing go. It wasn’t easy. After the first week, I felt like I was wasting time. Especially since I’m unemployed right now, I felt like I should be taking action. But especially since I’m unemployed right now, I took other action—like looking for work while also trying to build my side gig up.

After two weeks, the feeling faded. By last week, I’d developed a healthy distance from the story. I have the right balance of fondness for it and its characters vs. the understanding that the narrative structure will certainly need to be adjusted. Waiting any longer means my interest will start to wane as other ideas emerge from the primordial soup of my mind.

My first step is to read the whole thing straight through, without marking anything up. I want to remember what I’ve written and evaluate it from a reader’s perspective. Then I can start working on the superstructure. Do I have the right scenes, in the right order, to tell the story I want to tell? That’s the question I want to answer in this draft. I expect that I’ll find there’s a lot to adjust. Once I complete the first read-through, I’ll go through it a second time. The second read-through is where I’ll determine what scenes I need to drop, add, or move. Those notes will guide the work of structural revision.

I have no idea how long it will take. I’m not going to push myself to complete it by a target date. That has never worked well for me. I’ll aim to write a target number of words per day, whether that’s in the form of exploratory writing in the notebook or manuscript words, or a combination. Steady pace with focus will create a healthier experience. Once I’m done, I will let it lay fallow again. I might need a second structural pass, or it might be ready for a revision that focuses on scene-level structure. I won’t know until I get there, and I won’t worry about it until I finish this draft.

I’ll keep you posted.

Dream. Home.

Sam Falco
Daily writing prompt
Write about your dream home.
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I live in a 1920’s-era Spanish Revival style home with three bedrooms and two baths. It is roomy enough for two people with no children, and yet I often dream that it is larger than it is.

I’ve had this thematically recurring dream for decades. I find a door, a stairway, or a ladder that leads to a space several times as large as I have. Sometimes, the new space surprises me. The first time I remember the dream was when I was in grad school, living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment. I found an iron, spiral staircase leading up and discovered it led to a glass-walled arboretum filled with exotic, tropical plants. Since then, I’ve dreamed of cavernous basements, rooms that I vaguely remember having closed off years before, and whole new wings of the house I live in now. Sometimes, I even remember within the dream that I’ve had dreams like this before. Of course, in keeping with the way dreams work, I never realize that I’m also dreaming now.

When Sweetie and I began getting rid of clutter last year, we were both stunned at how much more space we had than we realized in the basement and the cedar closet in the hall. I said it seemed like one of my dreams and she said, “But this is real.” And I said, “That’s exactly what you would say if I were dreaming.” Then she poked me in the ribs, we started giggling, and I didn’t wake up, so it must have been real.

But when I do have these dreams, what’s going on? I once read an article about researchers who believed they had proved rats dream and, in their dreams, plan how to get food. Maybe dreams are a way of mentally rehearsing our lives and my subconscious occasionally reminds me to look for opportunities and options I have forgotten I have.

What if I didn’t sit?

Sam Falco

Yesterday, when I returned home after running a couple errands, I had a few tasks left on my to-do list. The familiar thought that crossed my mind was, “I’ll start them after I sit for a few minutes.” And then I thought, “What if I didn’t sit?” Sweetie wasn’t due home for a couple hours and there were many things I could do around the house beyond the basic to-do. What could I accomplish if I refused to sit?

A lot, it turned out. After knocking out the to-do list, I started tidying the office. It had become super cluttered over the past month. The built-in cabinet was a mess. The chair I used to like sitting in for journal entries was piled high with supplies I couldn’t put away because the cabinet wouldn’t hold anything else. Papers covered my desk. I kept at it until the only thing that still wants attention is a rolling cart that has an assortment of odds and ends. I’d have put them away, too, but Sweetie came home earlier than I expected and off we went for dinner at our favorite Chinese restaurant.

I have developed a habit of doing a small thing and then rewarding myself by sitting “for a few minutes.” I have a hard time doing nothing, so I pick up a book, become absorbed, and a few minutes turns into thirty or more. I’ll set a new goal for when I’ll get up. It’s easier to keep reading and more fun, too. The cycle repeats and time slips away. I’ve read a lot, but necessary tasks pile up. The sheer volume of stuff to do intimidates me and… well, it’s so overwhelming that I have to sit down.

I don’t need to rest after fifteen minutes of light activity. Or even two hours. I’m even standing up as I type this post. I’ve put a sticky note on the cover of my Kindle, my laptop, and at the top of my computer screen: “What if I didn’t sit?” I bet I’ll get more done.

Ideal Day

Sam Falco
Daily writing prompt
Describe your most ideal day from beginning to end.
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This prompt reminded me of an exercise a friend introduced me to: “the ideal average day.” Rather than describing the most perfect day you could ever have (which is how this prompt initially read to me), you think about the kind of day you’d like to have, on average, every day.

I like that focus better. The “most ideal” is a day you’re going to have once if you’re lucky. It may be unattainable and then you’re chasing something you can never have. And if you achieve it, it’s all downhill from there. Regression to the mean applies to more than statistics.

Rather than thinking about what the best day ever would look like, I prefer to consider the whole of my life. What’s my ideal daily experience?

What’s Important?

To answer that question, I have to first think about what’s important in my life. Sweetie. Creative expression. Learning. An income.

Yes, I would like an income. As a recently-laid-off guy, I miss the regular paycheck. (Or will once the severance runs out.) Do I want a job, in the form of a forty-hour a week gig? I am looking for one, and I will certainly take a suitable one when I find it. Unless I have another means of making money.

My ideal average day includes the things that are important to me, and it somehow includes an income. For this exercise, I want to envision an ideal average day where my income derives from my creative endeavors.

Morning

I wake up around six. Coffee is waiting for me because Sweetie gets up before I do. Don’t @ me; I’m not being sexist. She’s a morning person who gets up at least an hour before I do and she makes coffee. We have our coffee together if she hasn’t already had her two cups. Then we go for a walk together, pet the neighborhood dogs and cats, and come home for a light breakfast. After washing our hands, in case you missed the part about the neighborhood dogs and cats.

After breakfast, I take about an hour to write in my journal. That often segues into creative exploration that bridges into the rest of my morning’s creative expression. Most likely, that’s writing, although occasionally there’s a computer program I want to work on.

Afternoon

After I wrap up my creative morning, it’s time for lunch with Sweetie. We make it together. She tells me about her morning, spent in the garden. She’s seen new growth on her plantings, caterpillars going into chrysalis, and dozens of birds in the yard.

After lunch, I study or do research. Learning feeds my creative mind. Then I turn to business matters. Remember that income I mentioned? My creative work feeds it, and so I have to attend to it. The afternoon is when my analytical mind is at its strongest and the creative mind is quiescent. I leverage that pattern to play to my strengths.

Evening

Dinner with Sweetie. We cook together again, except on the nights when we visit our favorite restaurant. (Good Intentions. Try it. Your taste buds will thank you.) After washing up and doing whatever other daily housekeeping chores need doing, we go to the living room. The television is tuned to a soccer match. I’m not paying attention to it but I like the background sounds as I read fiction, or play a computer game, or write some more. Between 9:30 and 10:00, I brush my teeth and climb into bed. I sleep well.