I’m sorry, guys, but I’m having a soapbox moment here. Why are apparently so few writers willing to get their worked critiqued? For example, the LV Writers Group already has 27 people tending for the April 19 meeting. But we only have myself and the organizer for the critique group meeting.
You need a set of fresh eyes to look at your work. Once you’ve gone over your own work a dozen times, you become too familiar with your story. You no longer see typos because your brain starts filling in missing words, correcting misspellings. Further, you lose objectivity when it comes your characters, plot, settings, etc.
Sure there are tricks to make editing and critiquing your work easier. You can read it aloud, go into Word and double column it and put in landscape format (odd formatting forces you to read more closely than normal.)
Even so, you’re likely to overlook passages that don’t work, plots holes that your brain filled in for you, and so on. Sure, sitting across the table from someone having them tell you that a lot doesn’t work in your story is scary. But isn’t it better to know the truth now than put it on Kindle and get bad reviews and low sales?
Now don’t get discouraged if your critique partner doesn’t like your story. Hemingway said “The first draft of anything is shit.” You can always go back and fix the problems.
*steps off the soapbox and puts away* To think this post was originally just going to be tweet 😉
The Communiqué of Consternation 