The Red Ink Experiment - What a Workshopped Piece Looks Like

I my previous post I promised to share what a ‘workshopped’ piece looks like, and the time has come. The story I tossed out there is one I quite like in theory, but cringe at in execution, so it made the perfect Red Ink Experiment. I got the benefit of a lot of incredibly helpful feedback, with the knowledge that there would be plenty of recommended changes to showcase the Fiction Workshop’s abilities.

Elsewhere on Steemit, there are people who shall remain unnamed blogging about how you don’t need to have good grammar, spelling, or punctuation to succeed as an author. These people explain they have secret knowledge of how to make big bucks self-publishing. Reading between the lines - and glancing at their wallets - it seems the secret is to convince other Steemians you have a secret, and they only have to send you some SBD to become privy to it.

Seems legit

You don’t have to create error-free, well-structured, marketable fiction to self-publish. And with Steemit, self-publishing is a few clicks away. You can even have your Steemit-posted original works hosted in the lovely, professional online library Steem Shelves, where the links won’t be buried after a week and all of your followers can easily browse your works.

But if what you want is error-free, well-structured, marketable fiction, the place to make that happen is the Fiction Workshop. In my post Tips for Fic Part 4 - Work(shop) that Thang!, I explained folks should be prepared for honest critique. Will some kind things be said? Likely. But the real improvement doesn’t come from flattery, it comes from critique. To prove you can both survive and benefit from a brutally honest critique, I offer my Red Ink Experiment in all its bloody gory.

There are some screen grabs here from the Word Doc @rhondak sent me separately, but you can view a PDF of the full Google document with its markups directly at this link. You’ll notice some comments are nice, most are what I need to fix, and there are edit suggestions ranging from rewording to comma placement. When six or seven people have at your work, they won’t agree on everything, and as the author, I might not take every single bit of advice. But the amount of feedback, the number of readers able to catch errors and say how the story reads to them, is invaluable. Many thanks to those who participated in this by offering their time and talents: @rhondak, @carolkean, @gmuxx, @geke, @jean.racines, @cosimo, and please I'm so sorry if I missed anyone but sometimes it's hard to tell who's in the Google doc!