Some Tips On Noting Friends’ Pieces
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
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Today, we’re talking about how to give a friend notes on a piece: what’s your role? How should you approach it? And why? We’ve got some tips!
After that, we’ve got a couple of recommendations of things we’ve been into lately: an “Email Game” and an omnivorous British podcast.
Some tips on noting friends’ pieces
Finding someone to swap notes with is something we are constantly recommending. There are so many reasons to do it: Even if you don’t aspire to be an editor, reading and noting someone else’s work is a great way to improve your own writing. Writing can be lonely at times, and having someone to be in conversation with can help ease that feeling. It’s also ALWAYS helpful to get someone else’s eyes on your writing, and the best way to get someone to read YOUR work is to reciprocate. So how do you be a good noting partner?
Part of it is being reliable. Make the notes a priority, and your friend will do the same. Don’t take too long to get back to them, and give their writing the time and attention it deserves.
That being said, don’t put too much pressure on yourself to deliver the perfect notes. A lot of the skill of giving notes is an attitude thing: Your friend is asking you to look something over because they trust your taste and like your work, so you can be certain right off the bat that you have something useful to add. Your perspective is what’s valuable, so know that your subjective vision is what your friend wants.
And to make an obvious point, there isn’t a perfect version of any piece of writing out there. Don’t worry about perfectly “solving” a piece or finding The Note That Will Turn It All Around. It’s useful to see noting as less of being an editor and more as being a test audience: you’re an outside eye and a mirror. What do you see? What do you like? What made you laugh? Just giving an thoughtful account of your reactions and responses is incredibly helpful.
The secondary job is to be a sort-of staff writer, and offer ideas and pitches. How could things be more clear and precise? What other beats could be included? Do you have any joke pitches? Think of it as adding things, helping to fill up your friend’s hypothetical whiteboard with pitches. “Yes, and” is a cliche but it’s useful here: what’s working, and why? What’s working, and how can you think to get more of it? Start from yes, and then pitch.
To our way of thinking, your last job is to say no to things. If something is really unclear, or not working, or could potentially be read the wrong way, it’s definitely worth flagging. But never offer a no without a reason or a pitch — this of this as “no, why” or “no, but.” It’s not useful to close a door without offering another way out.
Again, noting isn’t rewriting or collaborating, it’s lending an outside eye. The Amherst Writers and Artists Method has a lot of great tips — a lot of it is geared towards groups that are probably less curated than a pal you’re swapping drafts with, but it has great things to say about how we should relate to each other as fellow writers. A few highlights from this technique:
“Writing is kept confidential and treated as fiction.” Even when a piece is written in the first person, it’s helpful to assume a distance between writer and character. Noting from the place that the “I” in a piece is a character avoids any awkwardness around critiquing something personal. It also encourages both reader and writer to approach the piece on a level of craft.
Another thing that we like from the AWA is the idea that “the teaching of craft can be done without damage to a writer’s original voice or artistic self-esteem.” This is an important idea to underline, especially if you’re noting a friend. Hopefully we don’t have to say it, but you shouldn’t be mean. People sometimes ask for you to really be brutal, but we haven’t found it to be very useful in practice.
It’s also not your job to wrench your friend’s piece to your taste — noting isn’t taking the draft you get and turning it into something that you would write. You want to help your friend do what they want to do. To use a clunky metaphor, you’re not being asked to drive your friend’s car, you’re being asked to sit in the passenger seat and help navigate.
And don’t forget: Hopefully this is someone you want to cultivate a relationship with! The relationship should be based in friendship first, and critique second.
Happy noting!
Some Recommendations From James and Luke
James recommends BBC’s In Our Time podcast. There is a lot to love about this show and it’s over 1,000 episodes. The format is simple: host Melvyn Bragg, the ideal British person, welcomes three experts on a topic and guides them through a conversation to explain it. The topics the show covers are all over the map: The Sack of Rome in 1527, The Finnish epic The Kalevala, horses. The episode on vampires is a favorite of mine, as is the one on the Gin Craze. The one on the evolution of teeth is cool, as is the one on the year without summer. The episode on P versus NP was very confusing but very fascinating. I could go on but you get the point: the topics are all over the place. In an hour, you get a brisk and dense introduction to something.
But what devotees always talk about with this show is the host: Melvyn Bragg is a beloved figure to a select cohort of nerds. He’s an expert interviewer, and genuinely and joyfully curious. He also leaves zero dead air — these episodes are packed. The Stop Gap ran a piece recently about Melvyn’s intros, which always start with a crisp “hello,” followed by a dense nugget of set-up and context.
The backlog of shows is intimidating, but if you’re interested in dipping in, I’d recommend scrolling through the list of episodes and finding something that strikes your fancy. But the real fun is tuning in each week, and hearing what in the wide world Melvyn and his guests are bringing to you.
Luke doesn’t play a ton of video games, but when he does, he tends to gravitate towards a type of game that he likes to think of as an “Email Game.” An Email Game can be played with no sound; it doesn’t have to be run in full screen mode; it has a lot of natural stopping points and a simple interface; it doesn’t involve a lot of intense hand-eye coordination and isn’t too taxing on your computer hardware, so you can have other programs running at the same time.
In other words, it’s the sort of thing you can have paused in the background on days when you have a bunch of emails to write (or similar work to take care of), so that you can switch back and forth between emails and the game as a way to give yourself a quick break without getting too distracted (or completely derailed) from the task at hand.
Luke’s current Email Game of choice is Despot’s Game. It’s about building a team of little guys and helping them fight their way through a maze. The fights all play out automatically—you just equip your little guys and sit back and watch how they do—so you’re not getting caught up in the type of reflex-intensive fast-paced action that can often lend itself to spending more time on a game than you intended. Each room contains a single battle or event, so there are a lot of built-in stopping points that make it easy for you to write one email, send your little guys into the next room, see how they fare, and then get back to your next email.
See you next week!
@lukevburns & @jamesfolta
We started this newsletter with our dear friend Brian Agler, and we want it to always honor his memory and his love of all things humorous. You can find our newsletter tribute to Brian here.
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