The care and feeding of a good critique group.
Now that my writers’ email lists are full of chatter about going at least partially indie, having a good writers’ group becomes essential.
The problem is finding a good group. And part of that is what the group is required to be.
In general, we want a writers group that will be:
Supportive during the downs of the writing career – and there will be a lot of downs.
Capable of celebrating the highs of the writing career – this happens too.
Like your writing enough that they don’t start every critique with “To begin with, this didn’t work for me.”
Be objective enough to tell you when your baby is ugly or at least needs to be potty trained
Like YOU enough to put up with you when you go neurotic –you will, if you’re not crazy when you start writing, you’ll get so.
REALLY like you enough to tell you “Okay, now you’re just jumping at shadows.”
This has all to be accomplished in an environment where, often, the only thing you have in common is the writing, you’re each other’s sole, regular social contact (who has time for a social life when you’re writing? Also, as I believe more people will be able to make a living from writing in the new model, more of us will not have day jobs), where you’re to a certain extent all rivals, pursuing the same goal, and where the normal response to your friend achieving a breakthrough in either technique or business is “Will I ever get one, too?” This is also an environment in which people who are incredibly frustrated in their would-be professional lives can feel like they have some sort of power. This often leads to people who become the tyrants of the writers group and exert their tyranny over crazy things like commas or words that don’t come from the same root.
Our group found we could maximize functionality with some hard and fast rules:
-Take the manuscripts home the week before. No reading aloud. Hearing something read is not the same as reading it yourself and someone who reads well and dramatically can paper over issues.
– Try to read them in the same environment you’d read a book.
-No discussing manuscripts in advance of meetings. (This leads to a false consensus. Only one person might have trouble with the schmerps, but by the time you sit down at meeting everyone will be convinced they hated the schmerps.)
– No nitts in spoken critique. I don’t care how many typos the manuscript has. Mark them and go on with life. If awfully typo-ey, then just say “You have an awful lot of typos, do a careful go over before anyone else sees it.”
– two minutes per critique, no extensions. That limits the amount of “think of something to say” and the horrible butchering if someone really hated something.
– if you don’t write, you can’t critique. You’ll be excused maybe a day off, but not more than that. If you haven’t written in two weeks, you can’t critique (this keeps the gods of workshops at bay)
– You’re not competing with each other. You will remember the goal is for ALL of you to be profitably published, and frankly it helps to break in as a group and help the others promote, too.
Things that will help:
If something bad happens, have chocolate. If something good happens, have chocolate. Reserve a bit of time after the critique session for decompression. This doesn’t need to be going out to eat (I had to drop out of a group when I was a young mother because I couldn’t afford dinner AND babysitter) – it can be a coffee in the kitchen of the member at whose house you meet. Learn to laugh together – you’ll need it. Because there will be moments you’ll want to cry.
Oh, and if someone is terrorizing the entire group and you can’t get rid of him any other way, tell him you’re disbanding, then change the time/place of meeting. (Yes, unfortunately we had to do that once. This will happen early on.)
Most importantly: enjoy the process.
According To Hoyt 
Interesting.
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Ok, going to play devil’s advocate here.
How does this group avoid the “bucket-o-crabs” phenomenon you talked about earlier?
How is this group any different than what I proposed earlier?
Why isn’t this crowd-sourced editing?
The only thing I can find that differentiates this from the example I gave is that these are hand-picked writers, and not readers, but you can hand-pick readers as well, or at least hand pick the readers you listen to.
What evidence is there that writers are better arbiters of good writing than just plain everyday readers?
Now there are cases where I believe in professional credentials, plumbers, doctors, engineers, but, no offense, I’ve not seen one iota of evidence that professionals have any real insights in the fields of writing, journalism, or the arts beyond ordinary people. (And I say that as a professor of liberal arts so I include myself in this judgment.)
I submitted my manuscript to about a dozen readers I trust. Only two were professional writers. Both came back with substantial, albeit different, serious objections over two different characters that would require me to extensively rewrite the book. So I polled my other readers. They loved those characters and vociferously disagreed with the pros.
As I examined the issue more, I realized that the pros objections to those characters had nothing to do with the characters themselves, but with those authors pet peeves about character-building. In other words, my characters didn’t behave the way these authors thought THEIR characters should behave. In other other words, I wasn’t writing like them.
I had seen this in academic writing so it shouldn’t have been a surprise. I once submitted a paper to a conference which got returned because I didn’t consider the impact of Roman bath architecture. The person who reviewed it was, you guessed it, the leading authority on Roman bath architecture. We all see the world, or rather we all wrench the world around to our area of expertise.
Now in academia, you just have to jump through these hoops to get by, so a line on Roman bath architecture was included, but in fiction this would get tedious.
Now, I am not religious on this issue, I am prepared to be convinced either way. I like hanging around other authors. As a group, they are a fun intelligent crowd. But more and more, as I am in my day job, I am becoming increasingly convinced that experts are nothing of the kind.
FYI – when not working on visual cultural anthropology (day job) or my fiction (night job) or art! (graveyard shift job) I am collecting resource materials for a side side side project on this very issue, the myth of expertise.
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Oh, and I should say, everyone makes their own rules and their own exceptions.
I do have a favorite expert…you! I would love to be in a writing group with you. But trying to be objective here, I have no idea if that’s because you already align with things I already think about writing or if in fact you are really good at what you do.
I believe it’s the latter, but, as an academic, I do have to hold out the other possibility. Sorry.
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Gad that was long winded.
Let me rephrase:
Proposition: a group of twenty people selected at random might be just as good at editing or reviewing your work as twenty carefully selected professionals.
Discuss.
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To some extent. Part of the issue though is that writers can tell you what’s wrong more precisely, at least if the’ve done the work to know what PRECISELY is wrong. So they don’t say “this is not right” they say “your character definition isn’t right because you did this or that.” And that’s easier to “latch” onto, particularly when you’re new.
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Related if only tangentially, on the wisdom of crowds:
http://io9.com/5841927/online-gamers-have-managed-to-solve-a-decade+old-scientific-puzzle-in-three-weeks
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That works very well if you have a problem that simply involves a whole lot of effort, the effort can be divided into smaller chunks, and one can clearly identify the “correct answer” when it is presented.
When it comes to fiction writing, none of those apply.
For an example of doing writing by dividing it into smaller independent chunks, I refer you to Atlanta Nights by Travis Tea: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1411622987/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=coldserv09-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=1411622987
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“Why isn’t this crowd-sourced editing?”
I dunno about you, but I think a half-dozen serious aspiring writers are going to be a lot more focused in their help than a hundred random people in an Internet community. The half-dozen writers are ideally both a group of friends (or at least friendly acquaintances) and also people who can help identify writing issues that the writer will work on over time.
Let’s say you have a writer working on whodunnits, and at first they aren’t very good with ramping up tension. A writer group can identify this problem and give tips, and will know to be encouraging when that writer’s next story is better. After some months, the writer might be very close to publishable, with a far better grasp of how to manipulate pace and atmosphere to keep the reader engrossed.
Now, if that same whodunnit writer were using crowd-sourced editing, they would get a lot of conflicting information, a lot of useless information (“Have you read King? I like King. You should try to write like King.”) and a lot of flak. (“I didn’t like this.” “Suspense? Try LOL!” “Go back to your day job.”) And when that writer improves, they’ll continue to get flak because not everyone contributing to the crowd-source project will have read her other stories. The encouragement is liable to get buried under noobish wanking.
Also, I myself have found that advice from a friend is much more useful than the same advice given anonymously because I know what biases my friend has. If my best friends tell me my book is distressingly violent, I know to take that seriously because they read violent fiction and wouldn’t object unless I had seriously overdone it. If fantasyreader112 tells me my book is distressingly violent, I have no way to interpret that. Maybe fantasyreader112 prefers YA books or romance fantasy that doesn’t have much violence in it. Maybe they were sickened by a character killing a foe with a knife, but wouldn’t have minded if the foe had been shot. I just don’t know, which is as useless to me as if you’d told a carpenter to cut a length of wood three long. Three what? Inches? Centimeters? Kondylos? Spans?
Lastly and least important, even well meaning but nonspecialized folk from the Internet often don’t have the vocabulary or experience to tell me precisely what’s wrong. They can tell they were jerked out of the story, but they don’t know that it was because the pov shifted or because two characters accidentally used the same unusual phrase when thinking about the same building. Sometimes a vocab lesson solves the problem. Other times, the Random Internet Folk just don’t read enough to be able to give me useful feedback. I read very widely, nonfiction as well as fiction and in many genres, but in my experience most people don’t read very much from multiple genres. That’s fine, but that combined with anonymity means I’d have a ridiculous time figuring out whether my fantasy story “dragged” because my writing was off or “dragged” because the Random Internet Critiquer only reads thrillers
In short, while I’m intrigued with crowd-sourced editing in theory, I think a real-life writer group is much more likely to be useful (and focused, and beneficial) than a crowd-source attempt.
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Everything you say is absolutely right. It’s also, btw, why I hate getting chapter-by-chapter critiques on novels. Because over the week, even with a dedicated writers’ group you forget what happened a chapter and a week before and your critique will be skewed.
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Oh, yes, and part of interpreting the critique ABSOLUTELY comes from knowing the reader. For instance, in one writers’ group, someone insisted I wasn’t writing SF. Why? Not an SF reader, and it eventually emerged my story wasn’t SF because “it’s not at all like Star Trek” After that if he insisted my story wasn’t SF I nodded sagely and thanked him. Mind you, he was the one we had to change the meeting date to avoid :-P So it was mostly a matter of grinning and bearing it.
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As a member (and now moderator) of a critique group for several years, I don’t entirely agree with the hand-out-homework, no-reading-aloud dicta.
Our members are busy people; homework doesn’t get done. We discovered this when we were trying to get people to prepare for discussions of craft-related readings. It’s not a matter of dedication or seriousness; it’s a matter of putting Job 1 (the paycheck) and Job 2 (the family) ahead of non-paying Job 3 (writing). If only a couple people get the homework done, how does that serve the writer looking for critiques?
Yes, a good reader can make a mediocre piece interesting, just as a bad reader can destroy a good piece. A couple of our members understand they’re not good readers and will get another member to read for them. Reading aloud hasn’t hindered our members from making significant notes and changes on their printed copies of the text. It does, however, ensure everyone goes through the text at the same time and the same pace. Also, this may be the first time the author has read the text aloud, which often reveals awkward wording, undiscovered repetition or other badness. Everyone comes out ahead.
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Well, again, if people don’t read, they can’t write. Or at least not get critiqued. I should add here, we kept our group to about ten people. And yes, we were all busy too but let’s face it, a writers’ group is a commitment. And yes, everyone in my group had other jobs and family. But we committed to getting it done. The thing is most readers are NOT going to hear your book read aloud. And yes, I have two or three stories that sound GREAT read aloud and which are duds to read. My Shakespeare series is much, much improved if read aloud, though I hope it’s not a dud to read.
I agree with you that reading aloud is beneficial to editing, but you should NOT do it for critique. You should do it when editing your own work, before you revise, and I often do.
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