Advice, Please--and Keep it Nice

 

Terry here with our question of the week: Have you ever been in a critique group and, if so, what was most/least useful to you?

I’ve been in several critique groups—oh, the stories I could tell!—and I generally feel they have been useful. In fact, I’m now in two critique groups with very different processes. The first is a long-running critique group that I’ve been in for 30 years. The group consists of a TV screen-writer and editor, a non-fiction writer, a short story writer, a mainstream novelist, and me—a mystery writer. You might wonder how those with such wide-ranging writing goals are of use to me, a mystery writer? I was amazed to find they are among my best critique partners, ever. We turn in to the group everything from chunks of a novel, to complete books, synopses, non-fiction proposals, and query letters. It’s all over the place. And it is a really useful group, thoughtful and serious. The group amazes me with their close reading of a genre (mysteries) that they don’t write in and may not even enjoy reading. They read my manuscripts carefully and make some of the most astute comments I’ve ever had. The non-fiction writer is especially helpful. Go figure! They are the finest of what group members can be—people who care enough about the material to concentrate on it and make comments they hope will be useful. 

 The other group is useful in a different way. It’s more a work-in-progress group. We read small selections, up to twenty pages and often don’t ever see the complete work. I find that if I’m struggling with a particular section, it’s helpful to have other eyes on it. They are a bunch of very skilled writers and their ideas tend to be focused on what I’m writing—not what they want me to write. They are respectful and careful about their process. 

These two groups are a distillation of ones I’ve participated in for many years. There's more than just "getting" critiques. There's also giving them. I’ve been in groups with people with a wide variety of critique skills, both in giving and taking suggestions. I’ve  suffered with people who couldn’t seem to bear even the slightest suggestion that they needed to change something. I wasn’t sure I even understood what they hoped to get out of a group, except maybe to hear praise. And then there are people who were invariably harsh and seemed unable to think of ways to soften their criticisms If someone is too critical it can overwhelm a writer. These extremes aren’t good group members. They aren’t able to take advantage of a process that can be useful. 

The “sandwich” theory of critiquing seems to work best—sandwich a negative between two positives! It doesn’t mean you have to be smarmy, but to find something you can say in a positive light: setting, dialogue, characters, plot, prose, and description. 

 The value of a critique can depend on where someone is in the process. My experience about what has been most useful to me has changed as I gained experience as a writer. Early on, I was hungry for pretty much anything anyone had to say about my writing. That led to me to eagerly accept everything the group members said, and bend my words into pretzels when I revised based on a critique session, trying to please every commentator. Only with experience did I begin to realize that taking ALL advice was not helpful. What I needed to do was listen to advice that was valid for my vision of the book. In other words, I had to learn not to let others write my book. 

 But there’s another piece of this—sometimes you get advice that seems really wrong, that you dismiss out of hand. In fact, I’ve learned that sometimes the critique that seems least useful to me, in retrospect has value. So although it’s important to keep your goal in mind about what you think you’re writing, it’s also a good idea to let your group’s suggestions percolate in case they’ve given you valuable information that you weren’t ready to receive. 

 Critiquing is a two-way street. The most important thing about being in a group is to determine what you want from it. And to make sure the members of the group know what you want. Good critique group members will listen to and understand a writer’s goals and make critiques that fit that. If someone has turned in a novel that they think is pretty much done, group member shouldn’t go off on a tangent about how the book should have been written. One way to make that happen is to ask the writer what they hope to get from the critique session. If they say they just want a general feel whether the story line is interesting, it’s not going to be helpful to them if the members go off on line editing. 

 But the writer has a responsibility too, to let the group know if their needs aren’t being met, and what needs to change to make that happen. 

 One last remark. It’s hard to be in a group with people who are in very different stages of writing. Published writers may have different goals from beginning writers. They have different levels of skill and may want different things from a group. So if you’re thinking of joining a group, that’s another factor to take into consideration. Critique groups can offer a lot, but you have to be willing to be up front about what you want, and be willing to listen to what others want as well. It’s a work in progress! And here's the ultimate critique: