In praise of critiquers

My favorite "easy" crit comment:

I'm, shall we say, "challenged" with description. I'll picture a room in my head and because I know what it looks like and where the furniture is, I blithely have scene after scene happening in it without considering whether my readers can also envision the room.

So my MC is an admin, PC at desk. Her boss has a separate office, PC at desk. There's also a small connected bathroom. Her boss offers her a promotion and she chews on it by going to the bathroom and dumping her cold coffee in the sink. Then her noisy screensaver kicks in and she gets distracted. Three separate contest judges asked me why she had a PC in the bathroom.


My favorite "shred" crit, that took me weeks to work through:

An agent read (face-to-face) my first chapter. His first words: "You hooked me." He then took a red pen and made check marks on the pages as he said: "This is cliche. This doesn't make any sense. The name of your villains doesn't convey fear. Your use of oddly spelled names is distracting. This is backstory. This slows the pace."

And everything he said was right. (And I made it out of there without bursting into tears! He was eviscerating my baby, waaah!) A year later, I saw him at a conference and thanked him. Because that was the most helpful crit I got, hands-down. I grew my first layer of rhino skin from it.


Funniest comment: My MC is interviewing people, and is a nervous wreck. Sitting in her car after the first horrible experience, she gets her act together and is about to head to # 2 when (because she was sweating) she sniffs her armpits and heads to the store for deodorant. A reader said she was offended by that and it was too earthy. She suggested I cut it.

It's still in.

I have a friend who demanded to read the first book after it was polished up. I shrugged--she's not known as a voracious reader--and said sure, why not. She read the book in two days and gave it back with tons of red ink.

The best part is that half the red ink was "goods" ("This is a great line!", "I love this character!", etc). The other half were well-thought out critical assessments. She was dead-on every time with those.

I was shocked to find such a wonderful critter in a friend who usually takes 6 months to read a book!

I went to an SCBWI conference earlier this year and joined an informal critique session with a few other writers who had YA novels in progress. At 26, I was the youngest of the critique group by far. I had come into that conference feeling pretty confident (with a glaze of cockiness), but the first day humbled me. There was so much I had left to learn, not only about the children's / YA market, but about things that had never occurred to me to learn -- like, say, how to prepare a manuscript for critique. What I brought was a mess -- single-spaced, 10-point font, and, oh yeah, it was a selection from Chapter Five.

I read out loud because the ladies in the group couldn't read the small type on my pages. Heck, even I had a hard time with it. When I finished reading and sat back to listen to the group discuss my story, I realized it was the first time in nearly 6 years that I had put my fiction up for judgment. The ladies asked some very tough questions, and I stammered through my answers.

This one woman, a retired English teacher who had replied with a seemingly uninterested "hm" when I'd told her what my novel was about, stepped away for a while to have her formal critique session with a Delacorte editor. When I saw her later, though, she handed over one of the copies I'd made of my Chapter 5. She had written all over it -- in red pen, natch. Questions, observations, alternate phrasings. Also, she'd crossed out about 15% of the words on each page. I'd never thought of myself as an overwriting writer, but when I saw her strikethroughs I realized how needlessly complex so many of my sentences were.

I thanked her at dinner that evening, but I never got her contact info and now I don't even remember her name. Getting the critique from her was the breakthrough I needed for my writing -- the ass kick I needed to go from NaNoWriMo enthusiast, agent blog addict, and Bird by Bird reader to someone who actually revised and finished pieces of fiction. I've worked on my novel nearly every day since then. That conference happened at the end of February, but as far as my writing progress and mindset go, it was a lifetime ago.

I have to just say everyone who's critiqued my sample so far has been immensely helpful. I was a little wary about posting in the SYW forum here, because any other forum I've been on, my work's usually just been ignored or I get a comment like 'oh, this was quite good, I liked it', which is sort of nice but not really helpful.

Here, even if there's been suggestions I don't really agree with, people have taken a lot of time and effort to put them forward and have given me loads to think about. It doesn't just help the project I put a sample up of, but my bigger fantasy WIP as well, so I just wanted to give a general thanks!
JessR