Bad Critique Groups—8 Things That Can Push a Group Over to the Dark Side. Plus a Halloween Contest!

Good critique groups are the easiest (and cheapest) way for new writers to learn the nuts and bolts of the craft and keep those cringe-making first drafts from gumming up agents’ and publishers’ desks (or becoming part of Konrath’s tsunami of crap.)

UPDATE: If you're looking for a good online critique group or beta reader, Lynnette Labelle has formed a critique matchmaking service on her blog. She's got a great questionnaire that I think will weed out any of the following problems. Here's the link to Lynnette's Blog.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Group feedback can help skilled writers as well. A lot of us like to process our work through a group before we send it out into the unforgiving marketplace. (Nobody’s snarkier than the one-star Amazon reviewer.) I’ve read that even Amy Tan still runs her work by her critique group for feedback and suggestions.

I personally belong to a fantastic group that has become like family to me. I trust them with everything from nurturing my sucky first drafts to polishing final copy. We’re all veteran critiquers with long history together. Critiquing is a craft, just like any other aspect of writing, and abilities grow with practice. After fifteen years together, these folks are pros.

But I lucked out. Not all groups are useful. Group-think can be dangerous. One or two empathy-challenged control freaks can goad a group of mild-mannered scribblers into a verbal Lord of the Flies attack-fest that will stifle the most faithful muse and damage a fragile creative spirit.

And you can’t be sure the advice is worth heeding. As journalist Jim Bishop said, “A good writer is not, per se, a good critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.”

Here are eight things that can make a critique group go sour:

1)     No rules. Without following standard protocol—like no cross-talk and no arguing—meetings can turn into free-for-all shout-fests.

2)     No moderator. Somebody needs to be in control and make sure rules are being followed and emotional arguments don’t derail the procedings.

3)     Misinformation. People who are full of false or outdated ideas of what constitutes good writing can ruin yours. For my tips on bad advice to ignore, click here. 

4)     The Grammar Taliban. You’re not going to be helped much by critiquers who harp about sentence fragments and how you should never use a preposition to end a sentence with. If you listen to them, your work will end up sounding like a high school term paper.

5)     Power Trippers. I’ve been to critique groups where one member went into a rage when it became obvious the writer being critiqued wasn’t going to make the changes the power tripper thought were required. These people need therapy, not a writing group.

6)     Praiseaholics. To them, any string of words typed onto a piece of paper is genius. Nothing is ever wrong and nothing can be improved. They might even get angry when you come in with a second draft, because the rough draft was “perfect.”

7)     Co-Authors. There’s often somebody sooooo helpful that she tries to re-write your story entirely—to sound exactly like one of hers.

8)     Dogmatic PC/Religious Policepersons. Critiquers who think you should only write stuff about people exactly like you, or them—or stuff that supports one political or religious world view—create tension that’s hard to overcome. Small minds create small books.

I’ve seen a number of wonderful writers pummelled by misguided critique groups. I first met author Catherine Ryan Hyde in her pre-Pay it Forward days when she read at a local critique group. Her story was brilliant. Scenes from it are still vivid in my mind. But the critiquers hated it—mostly because they didn’t think a woman who has never been in combat should be “allowed” to write about a male character fighting a war.

I was only a guest, so I wasn’t allowed to speak, but on the way out, I stopped her and said I thought they were full of crap. She shrugged and said she’d learned to cherry-pick the good stuff and ignore the rest.

But later that year I attended a prestigious writers’ conference where I saw an equally talented, but not as confident young man bullied by a bunch of know-it-all Bozos in a workshop. What was worse, they were egged on by the workshop leader—who seemed more interested in wielding power than in improving anybody’s prose.

I tried to speak to the abused writer afterward—to say how much I disagreed with what had been said—but he dismissed me with a few angry words and took off running. I realized he was close to tears.

That night I tried to write about that awful scene. In my story, the critiqued writer was so damaged by the bullying critiquers, he killed himself. Of course the story was way too melodramatic, so I later changed it to simply the appearance of suicide. Then I added a few more murders (I had to kill off that workshop leader!) plus some romantic sizzle, a couple of ghosts, a cross-dressing dominatrix, and a lot of laughs.

The result was a comic mystery called Ghostwriters in the Sky, set at a Z-list writers’ conference in the wine-and-cattle country north of Santa Barbara, CA. It was originally going to be published by my UK publisher as a sequel to The Best Revenge. I thought it had a great shot at finding an audience, because at the time I was a columnist for a popular writers' magazine, and this was a story I thought most writers would relate to.

But my publisher went belly-up and I slowly discovered that nobody in New York would go near a story about the publishing industry. 

“We live with this stuff every day,” wrote one agent. “We don’t find it entertaining in a novel.”

After a few hundred rejections, I put the book in the file of “not a snowball’s chance in Hades” and wrote a couple more books. But I was sad to lose the story. It’s got the most fun humor and most intricate plotting of any of my work. And Marva, the dominatrix, is one of my all-time favorite characters.

So I sure was pleased when Mark Williams asked to read Ghostwriters last August. He liked it and had some great suggestions of ways to make the convoluted plot less confusing. His suggestions were great, so I jumped into some major revisions.  

And now, ta-da: here it is. The world debut of the ebook of  GHOSTWRITERS IN THE SKY It's available at the US Amazon.com for $2.99 and the UK Amazon.co.uk for what I assume is the equivalent, which they won't let us Yanks see.

And as a Halloween gift: I’d like to give away a couple of e-books to any of you with e-readers or a reading app on your phone, PC or whatever. (And I can get a Nook version direct from the publisher, since Smashwords can be so slooooow.)

Just leave your name in the comments between now and 9:00 PM on Halloween, Pacific Time. I’ll give everybody a number and use a random number generator to choose two winners, which I will announce on November 1, along with some other exciting news.

I’d also love for you to share any experiences you’ve had with nasty critiquers. Have you ever felt bullied by a critique group? Or has somebody said something so nasty about your writing that you considered giving up? (It’s OK to comment even if you don’t want an e-book. I don’t have a Kindle yet, either.)

You can also read an interview with me today on Morgen Bailey's wonderful blog. Plus I’ve finally set up a Facebook authorpage. If you go over, you can see the covers of some upcoming books (and if you wanted to “like” the page, that would be awesome.)

And for you readers who, like me, haven’t yet been Kindlized: FOOD OF LOVE is now available in paper! You can buy it for $9.95 from Popcorn Press or Amazon.com (eligible for super saver shipping.) 

Coming up in the blog: Next week, on November 6, book reviewer DANIELLE SMITH of Chick Lit Reviews and News  is going to tell us how to query a book blogger, what her pet peeves are, and how to find reviewers in your genre.

Then on November 13, legendary mystery author and writing guru LAWRENCE BLOCK will be guest posting about his personal adventures with self-publishing. Usually you’d have to go to a writers’ conference or an MFA program to hear from a superstar like Mr. Block, so I’m totally jazzed he’s going to be visiting.

And in December, we’ll have a visit from one of my all-time favorite bloggers, Romance author RONI LOREN, who has an erotic romance coming out in January from Berkeley Heat. She’s going to counteract some of that doom and gloom and tell us some of the good aspects of being  published by a Big Six publisher.

The Gatsby Game is Out!

My life continues to zoom along at warp speed. Mark Williams just told me that THE GATSBY GAME is up at Amazon this morning--a week ahead of schedule.

It's a book I had to write--one that's been sitting in my head  for decades. It's based on the mysterious death of David Whiting during the filming of the Burt Reynolds film, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. I knew David personally, and I've always wanted to tell my theory of how he might have died, based on what I knew of his quirky personality. (It was ruled an accident, but many people call it a suicide, and some think it was murder.)  The characters in THE GATSBY GAME are fictional, but some of the scenes really happened--and David was as obsessed with F. Scott Fitzgerald as my character Alistair Milbourne. A couple of letters that serve as clues in the novel are real--and I still have them.

This has been called one of Hollywood's Most Notorious Scandals of all time,  Here is what writer Phil Nugent said about it in his article in Nerve.com. Note he says David Whiting committed suicide, which was probably not the case.


#7: The STARS: Sarah Miles and Burt Reynolds

THE SCANDAL: In 1972, Miles and Reynolds, both of whose careers were just taking off, co-starred in the Western romance The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. In the movie, the rough outlaw played by Reynolds abducts and eventually wins the heart of the flinty English beauty played by Miles, in the course of a story that requires her to suffer at the hands of crueler, less photogenic men. Midway through filming, Miles herself was physically attacked by her business manager, David Whiting, and sought sanctuary by fleeing to Reynolds' quarters; the next morning, Whiting was found to have committed suicide.

THE FALLOUT: At first, the creepy synchronicity between the movie's plot and what happened on the set inspired a certain amount of interest and rumor-mongering, and Esquire ran a purplish article by Ron Rosenbaum titled "The Corpse as Big as he Ritz."...[Miles'] failure to become a star probably had little to do with the unhappy fate of David Whiting. As for Burt Reynolds, Cat Dancing was a blip in his career, sandwiched between his first big hits Deliverance and White Lightning, and was almost instantaneously forgotten."

In spite of what Nugent says above, the scandal did have a terrible impact on Sarah Miles. It destroyed her marriage (although she and Sir Robert Bolt did eventually re-marry) and her career came to a screeching halt. She's detailed these events in her fascinating memoirs, Serves Me Right and Bolt from the Blue. 

I've never met Miss Miles, but I have great sympathy for her. I think she was only guilty of too much compassion for David, who was a brilliant, tragic, and sometimes comically self-deluded man/child.

I have made the nanny the protagonist of the novel, giving her the name Nicky Conway, echoing the detached narrator of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway. Although there was a real nanny suspected in David's case, I know nothing about her, and Nicky is not meant to represent her in any way. 

I changed the setting of the story from the small town of Gila Bend, Arizona to the small California oil town of Taft, for no particular reason except I've always wanted to set a story in Taft, which has a tragi-comic history of its own (it was originally named Moron) and it's closer to me than Gila Bend.

THE GATSBY GAME (with a forward by Saffina Desforges) is available as an ebook at at amazon.com and at amazon.co.uk, and will soon be up at B&N and iTunes, and will be available in paper in 4-6 weeks. 

This book would never have been published if it weren't for my blog, so I'll be talking a little about the rumored "death of the blog" in my Sunday post, and I'd love to have readers weigh in on whether they think blogging (or not blogging) has impacted their writing careers.

The $79 Kindle and the Most Interesting Publisher in the World

OK, I can finally say it: I have three brand new novels coming out this fall!

Within a couple of weeks, THE GATSBY GAME will debut as an e-book. It’s a stand-alone mystery set in the Mad Men era that proposes a fictional solution to one of Hollywood's most scandalous mysteries. (It's #7 on the top 10 list, if you follow that link.) 

The e-book will be published by a cutting-edge new e-publisher: Mark Williams International Digital Publishing.

Two comic mysteries will follow with MWiDP: GHOSTWRITERS IN THE SKY and SHERWOOD, LTD. They are the first two in a series featuring a perennially penniless socialite and her gay best friend.

Yeah but…sez you—what about Popcorn Press? Haven’t you already signed with them? Aren’t they re-launching your two UK books, FOOD OF LOVE and THE BEST REVENGE? Haven’t they been very, very good to you?

Yup. But because both of these presses belong to a whole new “united we stand” type of small publisher, Popcorn will partner with MWiDP and publish paper versions of the three ebooks. Paper copies will be available at the Popcorn Press site (and amazon.com) about one month after the debut of the ebooks. And yes! Paper copies of FOOD OF LOVE are available for pre-order at the Popcorn Press site right now for only $9.99. 

So who/what is Mark Williams International?

Because MWiDP only officially launched this week, I haven’t been able to talk about it before, but if you follow this blog, you’ve seen Mark Williams’ comments to many of our posts. He’s the “quiet half” of the UK’s phenomenally successful writing duo known as Saffina Desforges. He’s also mentored a number of other UK writers to bestselling superstardom.

After zooming up to the top of the UK’s Kindle lists—and staying there for months—Mark and Saffi have been courted by some of the biggest agencies in New York and Hollywood. But they turned them all down. They realized there’s a lot more money (as well as freedom) in the indie publishing world.

But Mark, who has been a teacher and editor for many years, knew a lot of writers (like me) who don’t have the time or entrepreneurial skills to self-publish. He also ran into many successful US indies who didn’t have a clue how to break into the European markets.

So he came up with the idea for a company which is a mix of small e-publisher, self-publishing facilitator, and marketer. They will provide professional vetting, editing, cover design, coding and uploading--and also use the networking and collective marketing developed by indie Kindle authors. MWiDP will also take on successful indie authors who want to expand their markets on other continents.

It sounded so good, I jumped in, even though it meant turning down three offers from the traditional publishing world: three offers I would have killed for a few months ago.

Here’s what happened to me at the beginning of September—just as I was madly preparing my three presentations for the Central Coast Writers Conference. In the space of less than 48 hours, I had a request for a read from one of my dream agents, an offer of representation from a top agency, and an offer of a read of my full manuscript from an editor at a prestigious mid-sized publisher. I also had requested full manuscripts awaiting reads at two other agencies.

But each offer had strings.

• #1 was an initial request for a partial—the beginning of a road that usually takes over a year and so far has had about a 95% failure rate for me.
• #2 was a maybe-offer conditional on a draconian rewrite that involved cutting most of the mystery elements, removing the gay characters and subplots and turning the book into something I wouldn't feel good about promoting.
• #3 was from a company I’d recently discovered has a seriously author-unfriendly contract.
• The two fulls had been sitting at the agencies for over 6 months with no word from the agents, in spite of several inquiries, so I had no idea if they were still being considered. (More and more agencies no longer bother to send rejections for requested manuscripts--even fulls.) 

I mentioned my dilemma in an email to Mark--and he let me in on his as-yet-to-be announced publishing company plans.

Twenty-four hours later, I’d joined Mark and Saffi’s new venture. Here’s my page at their new website. 

What am I—nuts? Isn't this just drinking the Kool-Aid that Janet Reid warned us about?

Maybe. And I absolutely do not recommend this for everybody. Especially for newbies. I think most first-time authors should try the traditional route first. Even if it's only to build up some soul-calluses. Publishing a just-finished first novel usually ends in disappointment and often discourages good writers from staying in the game.

But for me, it’s already looking like a smart move. One of the major factors that swayed me was that Mark could get my ebooks out quickly. He'd already read two of the three manuscripts and knew they were almost ready to go.

He also told me this will be the “Christmas of the Kindle.” He predicted Kindles would get very cheap for the holidays—under $99—and said they'll be THE gift. He expects this holiday season to be the hottest e-book buying moment in history.

And guess what happened on Wednesday this week? Amazon announced its lowest price Kindle will now sell for…$79. And the new Kindle Fire--an ereader/tablet that competes with the iPad, will cost only $199 (a loss to Amazon they expect will pay off in other sales.)

So I think Mark has a pretty clear crystal ball.

He pointed out that in the three or more years it would take to grind even one of my books through the traditional publishing machine, the whole publishing world will have changed. There may not be any more big brick and mortar bookstores. That window in Barnes and Noble where I’ve fantasized seeing my work will probably display only Nooks and Snookibooks. E-books will reign.

So I realized that for me--after fifteen years of bloodying my knuckles on New York doors--it made sense to get all my books out right now. (This isn't all the books I've written, BTW--I've got some practice ones in the files that will never see Kindle-light.)

Mark certainly doesn’t recommend that everybody take out their rejected manuscripts and throw them on Amazon (or submit them to MWiDP.) But I had three finished, multi-critiqued, edited new mysteries. (And yes, Mark did ask for more edits and I’m in the process of killing some darlings, but his suggestions improved the books instead of gutting them.) 

Do I recommend this for everybody? Again I repeat: no. Going the indie or semi-indie route is likely to lead to disappointment if you don't have a body of work and you’ve only been at this game a little while. Writing narrative is a craft that takes years to perfect. You don't open a restaurant after your first cooking lesson.

The reason this move is best for me is: not only will MWiDP make my ebooks available immediately, but my chances of acceptance by the Big Six are abysmal. I only recently figured out why I've been getting so many "I absolutely loved this, but..." rejections.

1) I’ve been previously published, without stupendous sales numbers.

2) My work doesn’t fit into a neat genre category.

3)  I write funny. Humor is subjective and can’t please all of the people all of the time.

4) Funny books by women are often lumped together as chick lit—the most hated genre in New York.

If you’re just starting your writing journey, please don't let me keep you from pursuing your personal publishing dreams. By the time you have two or three books ready to go, the industry will have settled a bit from the e-revolution and you’ll have many more options than we have now. The Big Six may not be as big and Amazon and maybe Apple might be the most desirable publishers. There will also be lots of collectives and small e-publishers like MWiDP to choose from.

If you’re in the process of looking for an agent, please keep at it. Agents will have very different job descriptions in a few years, but having a savvy agent in your corner will always help your career. I’d love to have one myself.

But right now, with all these books ready to go, it makes sense for me to join Mark's new venture and be ready for “the Christmas of the Kindle.”

So who is this Mark Williams dude?

He’s not a guy to toot his own horn. He doesn’t even post a picture of himself on his blog. What I’ve been able glean from his emails and posts is:

• He’s a very good writer and editor.
• And a phenomenally smart guy.
• He’s based in London.
• He spends a lot of time traveling the world, teaching third-world children and building schools.
• He first became interested in electronic publishing because of the opportunity it provides to get books to children in remote parts of the world.  
• He’s traveled and taught in lots of dangerous places, like Soviet Russia and Saddam’s Iraq. He has braved revolutions and lost dear friends in horrific civil wars.
• Right now, he’s helping get solar power to a primitive village in West Africa so they can use computers and electronic readers—an effort partly funded by money from his book sales. (He asks that when you get your new Kindles, you consider donating the used ones to his project.)
• He is apparently living in a mud hut. I don’t know if that’s a metaphorical hut, but it doesn’t sound like the Hilton.
• I’ve got to admit I’ve done a little searching the old Interwebz for a picture—but a name like Mark Williams is as generic as, well, Anne Allen, so I haven’t got a clue how to find him. Unless maybe he’s this guy:

So here I go on another publishing adventure….whee!

So how do you feel about all this, scriveners? Are you ready to take the self-pub or indie-collective plunge? Holding out for the traditional publishing dream? Willing to go indie, but want an agent to guide you? Or are you a successful US indie who’d like help getting into the European and Asian markets?

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I'm starting little blog tour in my own slow way this week. I reveal a few personal secrets in a guest post at Karen Jones Gowan's blog, Coming Down the Mountain due to post next Friday, Oct. 7th, and I spilled more beans at Prue Batten’s ‘Mesmered” blog: (with a great comment from Mark Williams hisownself.) Plus I've got some very nice cyber ink from Danielle Smith over at Chick Lit Reviews. Anybody who'd like an interview or blog visit, do let me know (and anybody willing to do a review, I'll be forever in your debt.)

13 Ways Not to Start a Novel

First, some news: exciting things have been happening this week for both Ruth and me.

Ruth's latest novel, HOOKED, which she's written with her husband Michael Harris, is launching today!. HOOKED is a Medical/Political thriller that Publishers Weekly calls “slick and sexy." PW says it has “all the sure elements of a big seller written by pros who know how to tell a story.”  You can buy it right here. And for a limited time, the ebook is only $.99. Ruth is a million-selling author who knows how to hook the reader and never let go. This is going to be a blockbuster! And today, she's guest blogging on the subject of genre hopping at Mark Williams International . 

As for me—I’ve had a nice bit of news from my publisher, Popcorn Press. FOOD OF LOVE will launch in early October. Plus they’ve accepted THE BEST REVENGE! That means both my romantic comedy/mysteries—formerly available only in the UK—will now be available in the US. You’ll be able to buy the paper versions on Amazon as well as $2.99 ebooks.

So—onward to our next novels. And as a reminder to myself as well as my fellow scriveners out there, here are some things to avoid when writing the opening pages of that next book.

13 WAYS NOT TO START A NOVEL

Starting the first chapter of a new novel is usually pretty easy for me. My muse has uploaded a shiny new story into my head and I’m all revved and ready to go, so I get those words down as fast as I can. (Then I usually bog down around page 100, but that’s another post…)

But all that first draft scribbling usually doesn’t have much to do with the final product. When we’re first diving into a novel, we’re not thinking about our readers; we’re telling the story to ourselves. All kinds of information will come up, but be aware you’ll want to cut most of it or move it to another part of the book when you edit.

And when it comes to that editing—the first chapter presents your biggest challenge. I’ve often spent more time on a first chapter than the entire remainder of the book.

On that first page, we have only a few lines to grab the reader and keep her from putting the book back on the shelf. We have to present an exciting hook and fascinating characters that will suck readers in immediately—but not overwhelm them with too much information.

We also want to promise something unique—not the same/old same/old they’ve got on the shelf at home.

But when we start writing fiction or memoir, some of the ideas that come most readily have unfortunately come readily to a whole lot of writers before us, so they’ve become clichés.

On top of that, the contemporary writer has an added problem. Because we’ve almost all grown up with television, we have the screenplay or teleplay format hardwired to our brains. But novelists have no cameras or music to convey emotions; no close-ups of a character’s face to show internal conflict. A lot of openings that would be brilliant in a movie are snoozerific on the page.

This stuff is on my mind because I have been working on manuscript evaluations for the Central Coast Writers Conference on September 16^th-18^th  (Yes, there’s still time to sign up! More info on tech day with Agent Laurie McLean and Smashwords founder Mark Coker here) 

As I’ve been reading first pages, I’ve been seeing openings that aren’t terrible, but aren’t grabbers, either. This is usually because they’re overdone or they’re copied from another medium where they work better.

Here are a few openings to avoid::

 

1)     Weather reports: the famous opening line, “It was a dark and stormy night” may keep contemporary audiences aware of Lord Bulwer-Lytton’s otherwise forgettable 1830 novel, Paul Clifford, but not in a good way.

Opening with meteorological events isn’t only a problem with people who’ve read too much Victorian literature. Our television-saturated brains tend to think in terms of the “establishing shot” of a screenplay. But a novel needs more than pictures to connect with the reader. It needs human emotion.  

2)     Morning wake-ups: showing your character waking up or getting ready for work/school hits the snooze button for readers. In a movie or TV show, you can show one character getting ready for work and it’s interesting. In the cable TV series, Dexter, the serial killer/protagonist's morning ablutions open every episode. But in a book, where you couldn't have the creepy-comic music and double-entendre blood orange shots, the same scene would bore us silly.

3)     Dreams: some people call this the “Dallas” opening, because of the TV soap that got written into such a corner the writers had to pretend a whole season was “just a dream.” Writers sometimes try to hook readers by opening with a scene of surreal horror—but if it all turns out to be a dream or a videogame on page three, the reader feels tricked.

4)     The death of the protagonist: This is apparently very, very big with the paranormal/horror crowd. If your MC is a zombie, vampire, or other member of the undead community, think of something else. This has been done, um, to death.

5)     Trains, planes and automobiles: if your character is en route and musing about where he’s been and where he’s going, you’re not into your story yet. Jump ahead to where the story really starts.

6)     Funerals: Slush readers say a huge number of manuscripts—especially memoirs—start with the protagonist in a state of bereavement. But most readers aren’t eager to embark on a literary journey with a miserable MC.

7)     “If I’d known then what I know now…” starting with the conditional perfect may seem clever to you, but unfortunately it does to a lot of other writers, too. This is cliché territory—don’t go there.

8)     Personal introductions: starting with “my name is…” has been way overdone, especially in YA. Again, not a bad idea, but too many people thought of it first.

9)     Minor characters speaking or thinking. The story-telling old man, the child—any detached observer telling the tale will only distance the reader. Whoever/whatever we meet first becomes foremost in our minds, and readers will want to go back to that character. Make the first person you meet an important member of the cast, not a spear-carrier.

10) Reader-Feeder dialogue, also known as “As you Know, Bob.”

“I must retrieve the elusive magical jewelry item,” says Bob. “Without it, I cannot access my rightful powers—and my evil Uncle Murray will usurp my domain.”

“But as you know, Bob,” says Sidekick. “The magical jewelry item is in the hands of the four skanky queens of the Bingo Borogroves and guarded by the Dire Dragoons of Doom. We will be risking our very lives.”

Sidekick is not saying this for Bob’s benefit. He’s saying it for ours. Conversational info-dumps are never a good idea.

11) Group activities: don’t overwhelm your reader with too many characters right off the bat. It’s like meeting a bunch of people at a cocktail party: you don’t remember anybody’s name if you hear too many at once.

12) Internal monologue: Musing is boring. Especially reader-feeder musing. “Back when I was younger, I would have slain the dragoons with my magic sword, but when my parents were killed in that chariot crash on the way to get Borogrovian take-out, and my Uncle Murray had me locked up in the Dark Tower of Doom, the skanky queens stole my magic sword and melted it down to make a necklace and a pair of matching earrings…” We don’t need to know this all on the first page. Bring in backstory later.

13) Too much action: Writing gurus keep telling us to start with action, action, action, but this isn’t actually such good advice. We need to be emotionally engaged with a character before we care how many dragoons of doom he slays.

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What about you, scriveners? What openings press your snooze button? What scenes do you see overused in your genre? Is there any opening that automatically makes you put the book back on the shelf?