Blog Chain: Critique Groups

Yay! My first post in the blog chain! Thank you all for inviting me. I'm super excited to be a part of your writing wisdom and experience.

Christine was before me, and Abi will be up next.
This chain was started by Mary who asked:

Are you in a critique group? If so, at what point do you send chapters to the members of your group? How detailed are the critiques you receive and give? Do all members in your group write the same genre?

At this exact moment in time, I'm not in a critique group. But I did just email my old one, and they are going to have me back. So by next month, yes, I'll be in one. I was out of my group for over a year as I was busy doing other things (moving, buying a house), but a critique group is invaluable, and now that I'm seriously writing again, I need their help.

My group began with some former co-workers while I was living in Los Angeles. It started with four of us, 3 screenwriters, and me, a novel and short story writer. Over the years people have come and gone, and now I think there's another prose girl in the group.

Because most of the members write movie scripts and I don't really write in chapters, we tend to submit whatever our best chunk of text is at the time. Sometimes this means submitting a whole screenplay or novel at once, in which case we try to give everyone 4 weeks to read it. We meet roughly once a month, in person (although I do everything over email now, since I'm not in LA anymore). When I was living out there, we'd have our group at a restaurant or coffeehouse and get brunch, and depending on the length of projects and how many people submitted that month, our meetings could last from 3-6 hours. Those were really awesome meetings. It's kind of hard to listen to people's criticisms right there in person, but it is also really fun and helpful to have a discussion with everyone who read your work. Now that I'm far away, I'm toying with setting up a webcam so we can still have that conversational dynamic.

Anyway, I always submitted at least 15 pages, and often the others would have at least 30 pages of script. If there was a month where no one had anything new to submit, we wouldn't meet. I suppose this is a much slower process, but I think all of us were pretty big picture people, and we preferred to read something in its entirety, if possible. So we would take longer to write.

The crits I gave and the ones I received were pretty detailed, I think. We were always really honest with each other and not afraid to say something like, "This isn't working for me" or "What this person is saying doesnt' ring true." When we met in person, again it was a lot of discussion, and I'd take tons of notes in addition to the notes the other group members had written.
I don't exactly edit line by line. If I have a problem or comment, I'll write it right after the sentence. If I really like a sentence or paragraph or scene, I'll say that too. But we all were pretty much looking for the "How is this working overall?" critique.
And I don't really want someone going line-by-line with me because chances are I will change a lot. I have submitted stories that were as good as I could make them, but I have also let some group members read NaNoWriMo drafts. For something like a first draft, I asked them to do a light read, and I was looking to see if they were at all interested in the story, and what themes they were picking out that I hadn't even noticed.
But the group members' interest is the most motivating thing for me. It is awesome to have someone read your stuff and say, "I can't wait to read what's next, to see what you'll do with this." Having an audience--a smart, thoughtfully critical audience--really pushes me.

And no, we aren't all in the same genre. I don't write scripts at all, and they don't write prose, but I've seen movies and they've read books, and that works for us. They've submitted horror, thriller, and romantic comedy scripts, and I've submitted YA and epic Western-ish novels, and short stories. My stuff tends to be pretty dialogue-heavy, so I think that's why we're a good match. And they all think in movies, so if they can "see" my stories, then I'm doing a good job.
Editing scripts has been a challenge because they are written in such a particular way, and I don't always get all the direction, which is helpful to them, to have someone unfamiliar with script conventions saying, "Wait a minute, who's doing what now? Where's the camera at?" The hardest part is to reign myself in on their scene setup, because sometimes I want to fix the language so it reads better, like in a literary sense, and I have to remember that doesn't matter too much, because a director might change that anyway.

Anyway, they're meeting again in May, and I'm excited to see what they've been writing for the past year.

And that's what I have to say about critique groups! Check out the other members in the chain to read how their groups work.