A Chorus of Voices: Your Critique Group

“The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.”
–Ursula K. LeGuin

I write alone. I sit at a very messy, old wooden desk that I inherited from a surveying concern in Perth, Ontario, and I write. Writing alone is a necessity for most of us. Sure, there’s probably that one woman you know who can plunk herself down in a food court and cover pages of her notebook with sterling prose, but she’ll be sorry when the IOU comes due on her soul. While you generate your words, at your desk or on your sofa or in bed, a profound amount of information sifts through your brain, both consciously and subconsciously. There’s everything you can remember about craft, the fact that the market may not know what to call your book, envy for the food court woman, a blast of irritation over forgetting a chore, a child or two demanding your attention (or not–which might be worse), the plot point you want to reach before you call the scene done, and the nagging suspicion that you may in fact be writing the worst book in the world. You juggle what you know of your characters with what you don’t know, what you guess might be true. You hope that, when you guess, you’re listening to the voice of intuition and not the voice of the crazy woman inside you.

Joining RWA-WF means that you’re eligible for a chapter-based critique group. The benefits?

*If you ever intend to sell that book, someone else is going to have to read it. It’s much nicer for that someone else to be a person who won’t send you a form rejection.

*Everyone reading your work has an interest in women’s fiction, not just romance. Your group can help you develop the personal journey of your protagonist in a way that honors her conflicts and struggles. These are not books about finding a partner–they’re about a woman finding herself, and using your voice to do it.

*A critique group will help you identify your bad writing habits–repetitive words, misused words, starting sentences with conjunctions (that’s mine). Everyone has writerly tics. A crit group will gently–gently!–point them out. By squelching that one bad habit another might pop up in its place, only for your group to still be gentle.

*A critique group may have people at various points in their careers–published and unpublished, writing in various styles, under varying circumstances, with varying opinions. You can’t get a perfect sample of your target audience, but you can get people with different experiences from you, and their opinions will run the gamut from completely confused to bolt-of-lightning insight. Even the confused opinion can be helpful; better to clarify now before you confuse paying readers. RWA-WF’s critique method ensures that your work will be treated with respect and kindness from critique partners who’ll expect the same consideration from you.

*Your family and friends may love you too much to be honest about your work. But your critique partner doesn’t have to live with you after telling you that Chapter Four is indulgent writing and that you could probably cut the whole thing out to tighten your story.

*One of my own critique partners, Ann Warner, puts it this way: “The most exciting thing about [critique groups] for me, is that sometimes (often if you’re really, really lucky) a crit partner will say something that allows you to see your work in a new way… so that when you begin another revision, it truly is with a new vision.”

I have to admit that I haven’t yet shared my own work with my RWA-WF critique group. (It’s my turn in eight days.) When I signed up for the training, I expected to submit work in September, so I became my group’s moderator in the interim. I’m glad I joined right away and didn’t opt out of being placed into a group, because I have learned so much from the women whose work I’ve been reading. They are all writing very different books than I am. As I reread the chapter that I’ll submit when it’s my turn, I look at it now with a sense of what my partners tend to notice in the work of others. I’m able to go through and slash other things besides my Ands and Buts, to write tighter and leaner, to cut to my story’s emotional core. If you’re writing alone, you may find yourself loving the occasional sentence or paragraph that does just what you want it to. At the same time, it’s still little black marks on [the modern equivalent of] wood pulp. Think about it. It just might be time to let your work become a live thing.

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Kim Samsin grew up in Pennsylvania and has lived in the southern and southwestern US. She currently lives in Ottawa, Ontario and is at work on a multigenerational women’s fiction novel. She blogs and workshops at http://www.thedeepolddesk.com .

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