Writing is a lonely career. It is generally you and your manuscript, alone together for hours on end. You talk to the manuscript or your characters talk to you. The only real feedback you get is how you feel after that last round of writing. But there is obviously a solution. Join a critique group.
While this might sound like a great approach, I have to give you a HUGE word of caution. That critique group may work out great, but unfortunately, for too many writers, that group is the death of your writing career. The suggestions of your critique group are only as good as their knowledge of writing and their education in the publishing field. Let me give you a couple of examples.
My wife is currently a part of a writing group on her college campus. It is informal and the 6-8 of them gather together twice a month (on Zoom now) to discuss their current writing projects and get feedback from each other. They are very committed to what they do and they really do mean everything they say about each other's writing. However, only my wife is really published. The others are "working on their novel", or some have had their smaller essays or short stories published in college literary magazines.
They do try. They offer suggestions on a sentence level analysis, pointing out how certain phrases sound great or how to tweak a word or two to make it "more metaphorical or symbolic." Yes, this is certainly interesting, but I have yet to over-hear anything that anyone has said that would make the writing something that could be published. But they take those suggestions and work the ideas into their latest writing. My wife listens patiently, but only waits for something that her editor would recommend. She would like to help them, but the reality is that her expertise is not in dystopian inspirational memoirs with a blend of non-fiction essay. I think you get the idea here.
A second example I saw was a writing chapter that invited me to give a couple of presentations. Again, this group was very enthusiastic about their writing, but I saw an interesting trend. They all wrote for the same digital only publisher (who, by the way, ended up going out of business due to poor sales).
What do these two have in common? These are both examples of "the blind leading the blind." People with a lot of good intentions, wanting to provide feedback, and yet, they were just leading their fellow critique partners down the same dead end road they were in.
Now think about this. If you look around the Romance Writers of America there are some REAL POWERHOUSE chapters. It is as if there is something in the water where they meet because the chapters continually pour out new and amazing authors on a regular basis. So what is the difference between these chapters and the others? It is the quality of writers in the group. In this last case, you have educated, trained and knowledgeable authors doing the teaching.
I have talked about this here on the blog when I have talked about signing up for workshops. Is that person who is doing the teaching really knowledgeable or do they just have a course title that sounds cool?
The point is, you can get a lot out of a critique group, if you make sure to join a group where people know what they are talking about. Just getting together with people and taking advice from people who don't know much is not going to help you in the least bit.
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