Tag Archives: critique group mechanics

Becoming a better writer: find a critique group

9 July 2014 Jordan 2 Comments

I know, it’s easier said than done, but truly, one of the best things you can do to improve your writing is to create or join a critique group. Having a network of writing friends helps to keep you sane, but more than that, a good critique group gives you hands-on help that no writing conference or craft book can touch.

Finding critique partners

This is truly the hard part. There are often critique partner matches going on ad hoc in the comments of popular blog posts, but you can also look to the forums of sites like Absolute Write and (I believe) CPseek.

Writers conferences can be another great place to meet potential critique partners. My critique group formed at a (kinda awkward) writers’ meeting. Another plus: we live close enough to meet in-person!

Finding GOOD critique partners

Just finding other writers isn’t the tricky part. You critique partners don’t have to write in the same genre, but you should at least be familiar with the conventions of one another’s genres. More than that, however, effective critique partners understand the mechanics of storytelling, characterization, and good writing. It can be very difficult to balance widely divergent skill levels, but this can be a personal preference.

For an effective critique group, you’ll probably need three to seven or so members. More than that and it gets unwieldy; less, and you’re only getting one additional set of eyes. Also important—although this can take a little time—you have to be able to talk freely and trust one another’s feedback. Critique partners should also know how to give useful, helpful feedback without tearing you down. Even the best advice in the world isn’t helpful if it cripples your ability to write.

Scheduling

For a longstanding critique group, as Josi S. Kilpack says, a set meeting schedule really helps to keep your group from petering out, especially if your group is online only. My critique group usually meets in-person twice a month, but during busy times we’ve met via Skype or just sent feedback in Word docs.

Format

Typically, a critique group has each member submit one chapter per meeting, then all chapters are read and discussed in a roundtable manner. But that’s not the only workable format for a critique group.

In my critique group, for example, we have one person submit their entire novel, a quarter at a time. We typically look at higher level problems of plot, pacing, character arc and characterization. It’s hard to dig too deep into word-level issues, but more than that, when we read the novel this quickly and in these large chunks, we’re able to see these high-level gaps more easily than if we’d read the first chapter six months ago, with six others’ chapters.

When is my book ready for a critique group?

This may also depend on how your critique group works. Some people use critique groups for a final polish, others bring rough ideas or outlines to work on the basic direction of the story.

I use my critique group as my first or second round of readers. If they’re my second round, my first round gets my book as soon as I’ve smoothed out the gaps I left in the first draft, just to see if the story works overall. Then my critique group breaks it down by quarters, focusing more on the storytelling particulars.

Another plus of this: because some of the changes we have to make are large, no one has wasted too much time nitpicking text that might change or be cut altogether.

After I go back through and make the changes from critique notes and work on the copy editing, if I’ve made big changes, my group will (kindly) take another look, either before or after a round of beta readers. Then it goes off to my editor!

What do you think? How does your critique group work? How did you find your critique partners?

Photo credits: Poet and photographe, version toile—Julie Kertesz; At the office—C/N N/G

Technique

A critique system that works

23 January 2013 Jordan 16 Comments

For the last year, I’ve been in my first-ever in-person critique group. Julie Coulter Bellon, Emily Gray Clawson and I started off with a fairly typical arrangement for critique groups: meeting a couple times of month, exchange one or two short chapters for each meeting, read and critique those chapters for one another in advance, then read them aloud and share notes at the meeting.

Until two of the three of us didn’t really *have* a next chapter. I’d just been reading about Kristen Lamb’s concept critique, which dovetailed really well with something I’ve long worried about with the traditional critique group format.

You see, if you meet twice a month and do one or two chapters at each meeting, it will take at the bare minimum six months to read an entire manuscript—if your book isn’t overly long and you’re going as fast as the critique group can accommodate you. If you only do one chapter at each of your bimonthly meetings, it could take you over a year to get through a single novel.

My impatience to get working on the next draft notwithstanding, it’s very difficult to critique a novel as a cohesive whole in this method. After more than a year, do you remember the opening chapters very well? How can you be sure the author has fulfilled the promise of the opening and the premise s/he began with? How can we judge the pacing when we read without any pace? How can we make sure the character arcs and story structure are working? How easy is it to to follow an author down a tangent rabbit hole reading a novel one chapter every fortnight?

While I do like having line edits from my critique partners, I’m unconvinced that’s the best use of all of our time. After all, a beautifully written story can still be fatally flawed and ultimately fall flat for readers—and traditional critique groups may be powerless to prevent that.

So sitting in our fourth or so meeting, facing the possibility that our brand new group might fizzle and die for lack of material (seriously?!), I ventured a radical idea.

Radically rethinking the critique group

One of us had a manuscript completed and ready to go. So, I said, what if we worked only on her book? She’d submit many more chapters for our next meeting—we ended up doing about a quarter of the book at a time. Within two months, we’d finished her entire novel, and then the next person was ready.

But it wasn’t just the time factor. We were so much better able to comment on how the characters grew and changed, how well the climax fit the story, how the pacing and structure worked, and more. And we still got the line edits in (virtually all the time).

Naturally, this method won’t work for every writer, reader or group. Our group is small enough that we can easily get a couple novels in each year.

And now for something slightly different

We’ve been working that way since last March, but last night ~~we decided to~~ Julie suggested we change things up a little. Normally we’d still tried to read all our chapters aloud. But when those chapters amounted to practically a novella in and of themselves, our meetings ran into the wee hours of the morning (with an hour commute afterwards!).

We first tried our newer method in december out of necessity. Our socializing was taking up more and more of our meeting time—no complaints!—we had a whole bunch of chapters to finish, and . . . I pretty much totally screwed up the characterization and motivation through the whole section.

So rather than reading the chapters, we focused on the notes—not the line edits, which we’d all carefully noted, but the bigger issues plaguing those pages. It was the best, most helpful critique group session I’ve ever had. (And also the worst, but that was because my pages were apparently the weakest I’ve ever shown anyone.)

So last night, we took the same tack, focusing on our big-picture notes: the exact things that would be so much harder to do if we’d only tackled a chapter at a time.

Yes, there are advantages to reading your work aloud (and disadvantages), and having someone else read it for us, but we can still read aloud at home. In fact, ideally, I do that before I even send the chapters out. Really helps to catch long sentences.

I really love our critique system. It’s different, but it really works for us. Just see what Julie and Emily have to say about it!

What do you think? How does your critique group work? Have you ever tried an “unusual” critique group format? Come join the conversation!

Photo credits: I think I do… [Do you need to edit your friends?]—eltpics; Editor’s note—juicyrai

Jordan McCollum