Carrow Brown's Blog

If you’ve been writing for any span of time, you’ve more than likely heard the phrase, “You should join a writing group!” There are a lot of good reasons to join one, but I’ll be the first to tell you that they have their cons as well.

First, I love writing groups. I’ve had the opportunity to meet some amazing people, hear stories, and make very strong friendships. Every week I have gone, I’ve improved as a writer. There are individuals who protest writing groups, but I am all for it.

What is this writing group thing? A writing group is a collection of writers, or avid readers, who come together to share their work. Sometimes these people are introverts looking for the weekly socialization and other times these are people looking to gain attention for what they’ve written. Some regard writing groups as a merciless collection of people looking to butcher your book baby and leave it bleeding red. Other times they’ll hold your hand and talk about how your words moved them.

Let’s dive into the positive stuff because, first and foremost, there’s a lot of benefits.

Writing groups are pretty awesome in the sense that you get feedback (for free) from a group of people from various walks of life. 90% of what I learned about writing I learned by attending my weekly sessions. I didn’t go to college for writing, take any fancy classes, or have a fairy bless me with creative wisdom. Not saying you shouldn’t do any of those things (especially that last one), but not everyone needs those. Having a degree in creative writing gives some authors an edge when progressing forward and provides a layer of content knowledge others end up learning later on. Many individuals I know who write do have an English or a Creative degree. On the flip side, I’ve also met authors who never took an English class outside of the mandatory requirements for their degree and their books are best sellers. It depends on you and what you need.

One of the major perks of a writing group is you have a diverse demographic to work with. At my group, we have several prior military members, a teacher, a technical writer, someone who was in prison for years, a prior police officer, a patrol officer, a computer IT person, a pharmacist and a baker. One of those people own their own publishing group and other individuals have been working with publishing for years and shares a lot of input when it comes to getting published. That’s a lot of different backgrounds to pull from.

Having a network of fellow writers is great. They’ll understand your pain, your struggles, and think it is totally normal you argue with people you can’t see in your head. They also have experience and advice to give you as you progress throughout your writing career.

If you don’t have the ability to leave your home, there are online possibilities as well. I tried a few sites in the first year I wrote my book and found the following three beneficial.

--Scribophile--
https://www.scribophile.com
Scribophile is an awesome writing resource with articles about writing, getting agents, and even self-publishing. There are also forums you can post on to either ask for writing advice or discuss various literary topics. They have a system for in exchange for giving three reviews for people’s work, you can request one for yours.
*Pro: Opportunities to network and get feedback for your work
*Con: Subscription-based and it will take *forever* to get your book critiqued with the way the system is set up.

--NaNoWriMo/Camp NaNoWriMo--
https://campnanowrimo.org/
Every month is NaNoWriMo for me, but I enjoy taking part in this because of the energy and people you met when you take part. There is a goal tracking system to help keep you productive and you can hang out with other participants at cafes.
*Pro: Awesome energy, support, and discounts on writing resources if you “win.”
*Con: Stressful if you aren't used to writing 2k words a day on top of whatever else you do.

--Writing.com--
https://www.writing.com
I used this website for the longest time but stopped with the site admin changed the rating of my story to Mature (violence/language). The website is very awesome. You can earn points through engagement, creating goals, and leaving feedback. It turns into a currency you can give to others to encourage them to read your work which they can use on the site store.
*Pro: Encourages you to write and engage with other writers
*Con: The majority of work is poetry and you have no idea what the credentials of the reviewers are. To unlock the majority of features, you have to subscribe. If you write anything with a mature rating, you won't be able to ask for reviews without paying for them in advance.

There are plenty of other sites out there for you to pick from, but these are the three I gravitated towards when I started writing. If you know a really good site for feedback, please feel free to leave it in a comment down below.

Did I keep up with the online groups? No. Mostly because I need human interaction with other people and I found online options to be limited in the long run. So where did I find my group? Meetup.com. You can find a group anywhere. They are at libraries, colleges, coffee shops, diners--everywhere. I picked my group because it was close and ended up really liking what they had to say.

If you do go to a physical group, be ready to bring copies of your work. If you follow the format I have below, it will save you a lot of time since the first thing people talk about in copies is your format.
---Bring printed copies (about ten will do) in Times New Roman, 12, double spaced, and paragraph indents with no space between paragraphs. Page length depends on the group you are attending. Check ahead of time.
---Your samples will be marked up and sometimes you can’t read it. Chuck the illegible stuff or work with the individual who wrote it to encourage them to write legibly.

I did visit a few other groups, which leads me into the types of groups you’ll encounter. The titles of the names below are made up by me, so don’t take them as gospel.

--The Soul Star Group--
This group has one amazing writer and if you didn’t know it when you arrived, you’ll know it when you leave. This person often gets amazing feedback and there’s never anything wrong with their writing. If you point out something that either wasn’t clear or make sense, the whole group will gang up on you until you stop talking. When it is your turn, everyone will tear your stuff up because you just aren’t as good as the star writer. I don’t like this group for obvious reasons.

--Sensitive Feeling Group--
This group is all about making you feel better about your writing. If you give negative feedback, be ready to say two nice things as well because we are here to build up self-esteem, not improve ourselves as writers. Not a fan of this group since I am looking to make my writing better, but if you are new writing needing a boost, this is good.

--Mandatory Verbal Feedback Group--
Even if you write all your feedback down, you’ll be expected to say something. And if someone said something you would have said, well, you get to say it again because we like redundant feedback. I typically write all my feedback on the printed copy and only say something if I want the rest of the group to have a say in it.

--Critique Beforehand Group--
This group requires that you do your feedback before showing up and discuss when you arrive. I am not a fan of this group because half the time you do the feedback only for the person to not show up. When will they arrive again? Who knows, but better bring those copies every week just to be safe...

--The Village Inn Group--
This is the group I am part of and I tried to think of a funny name, but couldn’t. These folks aren’t here to make you feel better but to look at your writing and see if a) it is clear b) makes sense c) help you find mistakes. They don’t attack you but try to help you with your writing. If you try to explain your writing because you think they don’t understand the vast workings of your mind, they’ll thank you for sharing and move into the next person. They like pie and hate adverbs.

“Okay Carrow, you talked a lot about the good things with writing groups. Where are the cons at?”

I know, I know… can’t give the good without the bad, right? Only fair.

The major downside to attending a writing group is it has one thing not everyone can handle: the crucible of creative discourse. As much as you want others to say your work is amazing and you are the next rising star in literature, they will point out your flaws, plot holes, misspelling, bad grammar, etc. You have to have thick skin. If you think feedback from the writing group is bad, wait until someone leaves a bad review for your book on GoodReads/Amazon. That stays FOREVER. You could argue that this is a pro, because it primes you for the day you have to receive negative reviews and toughens you for real-world criticism.

Sometimes you get poor advice from attendees at writing group. This is due to inexperience or misconceptions. Occasionally you’ll encounter someone who doesn’t know your genre and will offer suggestions to change it to what they know. Learn to notice where the unuseful feedback is coming from and ignore it. You may be tempted to argue with these people, but don’t. It’s a waste of energy. Thank them for their time and move to the next person.

People who go to writing group are socially unique. I’ve read stories that left me wanting to call the cops and met people I wish I could Silence on. At the same time, I’ve also met war veterans looking to tell their story, read memoirs for grandchildren, and encounters those from other countries trying to improve their written English. You meet a lot of different people and need to cherish the good over the bad.

The very last con is the one that irks me the most--selfish people. We all attend writing group to get feedback, but we offer it at the time same. It’s a trade of time and effort. I’ve seen individuals who come for their work and don’t offer any feedback on anyone else’s stuff and always return the copies blank. People like this are leeches using you to help themselves without offering anything in return. This is infuriating and the only thing I can offer to combat it is to treat these individuals as they are treating the group: give them nothing.

And there you have it. The good, the bad, and the “ugh!” of writing groups. My end thought is that even though these are my experiences, I’d encourage you to attend one (or a few) and see if you can find a group for yourself. The socialization and the support network alone is always worth the time.

If you’ve attended a writing group, how did you find the experience?

By Carrow Brown
Edited by Megan Talia

We often assume our most important character is the main one. The hero. The person who saves the day and gets the girl/guy/binary person and walks off into the sunset leaving a warm feeling in our heart.

But that’s wrong.

The truth is our stories are about how our protagonist responds to what the antagonist is doing. Better yet, heroes are trying to figure out what is happening so they can be one step ahead and do what they can to save the day. Take Harry Potter, Avengers, and Tamora Pierce's books for example. Each of those main characters are barely keeping up with the evil counterpart. It’s engaging and entertaining to read. But we forget that in our writing as we become focused on the plot, scenes with our main character, their relationships, and all the really awesome stuff we want to write with our hero in mind, that we forget about our villains. Our villains have a story too. They have motivations and past and at one point they were children who enjoyed playing tag with their friends.

Story Time

Learning my antagonist was more important than my hero was something I found hard to accept when I wrote my first book—Queen of Swords and Silence. In fact, when I initially finished my first draft, I didn’t create a tangible bad guy for my heroine to defeat. In my mind, I thought myself very clever in the way I’d originally set the overarching plot of my series into motion. I kept thinking that way until my developmental editor sent me her feedback. Let me share one snippet of it with you.

“Another weakness in the plot is a definite antagonist. We have the Hunters as a nebulous entity. We have the Dreamer. We have mooks. But we don’t have a clear bead on anyone that is actively (through their own agency) trying to stop Ghost. (Again, she doesn’t seem to have actual limits, so her foe needs to be impeccable.) Because of this lack of a clear plot and foe, the climax is weak, and the end not satisfying.”

Ouch. That one hurt pretty deep. But she was right. I created an awesome character, gave her amazing abilities, and imagined all the ass she’d be kicking. My editor basically told me I created a Mary Sue. Character’s—people—need an antagonist to kick them down, give them challenges, force them to go through change. Readers like going through those challenges with characters. Being told I had a Mary Sue character with no antagonist to keep the story moving forward was brutal. I ended up scrapping half of my book and rewriting it.

The first thing I discovered was I didn’t know a damn thing about my antagonist as the author—my first mistake. He appeared as this dark shadowy figure in the corner pulling the strings of events and complicated my main character’s life. When I did the re-edit, I realized I didn’t know his childhood, what lead him down his dark path, what shows on Netflix he liked or even his favorite color. These are seemingly unimportant details, but his interests and his choices, shape his character. It crafts his motivation and ultimately my heroine’s destruction.

Determined to create a fully developed antagonist, I wrote his name and what little information I had about him and slapped it in the center of my thought board. I stared at him for a long time and asked myself a lot of questions about him. This was hard in the beginning because I didn’t even like the original concept I’d created for him.

And then it hit me. I was writing someone I didn’t like who did things I rolled my eyes at. If I was having this reaction to him, how could I expect my readers to be engaged with him or relate to his motivation?

So I scrapped it. All of it.

Rather than forcing myself to create something I didn’t enjoy, I made him someone I would like. I won’t lie, I modeled his reworking after someone I have great respect for in terms of manner, speaking, and gestures when it came to his personality. After finishing the surface level work, I altered his twisted history into something which could fit the personality. I’d established and examined his desires, goals, and drive and found someone I liked. Hell, I’d probably have a beer with him if the opportunity presented itself.

When I finished, I found that the villain I fleshed out had chemistry with my protagonist. They could easily work together, maybe be drinking buddies, if the situation was different. Which helped in his ability to thwart Ghost, use her, to fulfill his agenda.

He’d left the realm of being a plot device to make my character do something and became a force all of his own. This is what you should do with your own. He/She/It should never be doing something for the sake of the plot, but doing it because they have their own agenda and hero is the one getting in his way, not the other way around.


Yin and Yang

Another realization I found about my villain while I adjusted my outline was he was not on equal footing as my heroine. If I put them in the same room together, I was confident Ghost would ping-pong him off the wall with little effort. I needed to find a way to give him an edge which allowed him to combat my character on equal footing. And I am not talking about having a massive army or a lot of money—those are cliche and boring.

No, I had to find the Yin to my hero’s Yang.

One of my favorite Yin/Yang combos has always been the Joker and Batman (notice which name I put first). You have rich, serious and devoted Batman fighting off poor and comical Joker multiple times throughout Batman’s crime-fighting career. Batman represents order while the Joker is chaos. The two characters have a lot in common and the Joker is always trying to push Batman against his personal code and give him that “bad day” in which Batman is morally destroyed. People love the Joke for the threat he presents to Batman physically and internally.

In some shape or form, your opposing characters should be able to square off against each other and have a difficult time beating each other. If it is too easy for it to happen, then your reader will throw the book against the wall while screaming “C’mon!” You don’t want that. You want them to gobble up the pages wondering what will happen next.


I Can Sit Around… Forever

Something I’ve seen repeatedly over time are villains who sit around and wait. Sure, the antagonist has lackeys who do the grunt work, but that doesn’t mean your villain is sitting around playing solitaire while the work is getting done. I’ve lost track of times I read a story and the villain is a static figure who only takes action when the hero does something. Your evil overlord didn’t build his empire by waiting for others to do things. He took brutal, merciless action. Why would they stop doing it? They still have a name to maintain, fear to invoke, and power to collect.

Sitting around and doing nothing, ironically, was my villain's problem. When I conducted the major overhaul of my outline in Google sheets, I created a column solely for my antagonist. I wanted to know what he was doing during the scenes, why he did it, and his desired outcome for those moments. In the original story, he did nothing. You only heard his name whispered, but he never did anything. That changed in the new outline. My goal was for my villain column to have more information than my actual scene synopsis. And you know what? It made a huge difference in the flow of the book. Your hero is responding to your villain, not the other way around, so take the time to know what they are doing and always have them do something.

The takeaway here is your antagonist should never be sipping tea and waiting for the hero to show up and give him trouble. Give them an agenda. Have them do things.


Special Evil Snowflake

“But Carrow,” I hear some of you saying “maybe that’s how your story works, but my antagonist was groomed to be the way they are since they were born. They were chosen by a dark god to be their avatar to ravage the land. Their only friends are rage and the cries of people they crush under them.”

Okay, so you’re telling me your character is an evil snowflake of specialness. Do they get a participation medal when they burn down a village? I’ll be the first (and not the last) to tell you something about that you may not want to hear: that concept is boring and cartoonist. Pure evil for the sake of doing evil things doesn’t interest readers these days. You remember back in the day when a guy with the bar handle mustache would grab the girl and tie her to the train track, but we never actually knew why he did it? Readers don’t want a typical mustache twisting evil person without any self-motivation or goals because they come off as flat and uninteresting. People are looking for an antagonist who has morals and beliefs they can identify with and feel conflicted when trying to figure out who to root for. Give them that.

Intangible Evil

Is your “antagonist” nature, war, a corporation, or nuclear fallout? Not society in sense, but a concept which represents the overall evil of humanity? It is possible, but if you want your story to revolve around a concept, you are going to need more.

If this is your first book, and you are trying to get published, your antagonist will need to be something the hero can overcome. You can’t beat nature, but you can beat someone in the story who wants to do your hero harm as they try to make it through the brutal wilderness while the zombies chase them. An example is “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gorgan” by Stephen King. We have a little city girl trying to find her way out of the forest and she’s not doing well as she faces mosquitoes, exhaustion, hunger, thirst… and something following her in the dark. If that last part excited you, then you’ll understand what sparks your reader’s interest.

One movie which could have brilliantly touched on the concept of human evil was Wonder Woman. Near the end of the movie when Wonder Woman vanquishes her foe, she expected humans to stop fighting, and you know what? They didn’t. I remember sitting in the theater and thinking, “Oh wow, what is she going to do now? Her ideals of humans are challenged at this point since they are still going to continue with the war. What will she do now?” And then the last part of the movie happened and I threw my popcorn at the screen.

I know there are strong counterexamples to my how your antagonist doesn’t have to be tangible. The Hatchet by Gary Paulsen is a story about a boy living off the land with no actual antagonist outside of nearby predators to overcome. It’s a great story (one of my favorites) but if you look up the author, it wasn’t his first book. He did several other works before tackling this and did so brilliantly. Gary had experience on his side when creating The Hatchet and was able to weave a story where the boy learned to live off the land while facing his own inner struggles. You have to really know what you are doing.


Conclusion

You antagonist is key to your story. It is important to put more effort into them than your hero. Readers have evolved away from Wal-Mart evil and crave depth with our villains. If you create a villain you come to love, your readers will as well. Put in that extra time and effort.

How do you approach writing your villain—your antagonist? Is he/she/it/they the first character you draft? The last? Or just some evil clown sitting in the corner twirling around a butcher knife?