Samples of Work

Hey, Wrinkles - you ought to try doing some critiquing in share your work. I've just realized I've been doing so much of it I've been neglecting my own stuff and I've also realized that SYW really ought to be a two way street - you ask for a critique, you help someone else by critiquing.

You say you don't have the experience or the temperment. You know whether something reads well - right? You know whether something makes sense or whether things seem to be left out. You probably can catch some grammatical errors. My philosophy on share your work is that the critiquers shouldn't do everything for the poster (and I absolutely refuse to look at a post of Chapter 2 because I think the person is looking for free editing). For the most part, if I see grammaticals, I'll say - needs some grammatical clean-up. If there's a blatant problem, I'll say something like - watch switching from present to past tense. Only rarely will I do a line by line (and that's usually if someone says English is not their first language). If something is absolutely horrible, I'll say something like - I'm not sure what your intention was but I didn't get it or needs a lot of work or didn't make sense. It's really not hard to give people some comments - and you don't have to start off with whole page critiques - just try a couple lines. How about it? Puma

Doing a critique is one of the absolutely best ways to learn more about one's own writing. It's easier to see problems in other people's work than in our own, and then, once we've spotted someone else doing, say, of POV slippage or telling instead of showing, we have a better chance of seeing it in our own work.

Just as an example, I had a critique partner once who pretty much always forgot to set the scene in the initial paragraphs of a new scene. We'd have a scene (or chapter) break, and the new scene would start, with dialogue and action and all sorts of good stuff, but I wouldn't know where or when it was happening, so I couldn't picture it, and I was confused. Once I noticed that pattern in her work, it was a good warning to myself to make sure I set the scene early in each scene of my own work.

Personally, I think that the person doing the critique often learns more from the critique than the person receiving the critique. It's worth a try, if not in the interest of fairness (can't get help without being willing to help others in return), for your own education.

JD

Thanks Wrinkle! And I agree with others -- it's a community. You don't have to be an expert to voice an opinion about someone else's work. It's a give and take thing. And most of all, it can be a fun way to learn.

I've posted samples on SYW once in a while. I will do more, and I encourage others to do so.