Jul 17 2008
The Critiquing Horrors - You’ll Get Them!
You Saved My Article… Thank You!
Until my dying day, I will remember the fear that swam through my veins as I watched them hatchet my work with X’s, lines, scrolls, and deletions they believed I should make. Their changes may have been constructive, but I wasn’t on the same planet anymore. I was on the planet where my article was living, breathing, alive, and they’d just damaged it beyond repair. I still have those seven chop shopped copies of the first article I’d passed by my friends at the Critique session.
Those seven dastardly beings killed my baby!
I was in love with my work and anyone who didn’t love my work exactly as I wrote it was no friend of mine. It took me all of ten minutes to realize that they were helping my precious creation, not hurting it. (All of them except the politically correct editor of the local paper who had her red pen in hand scratching at the existence of my being and deleting my DNA. She was still destroying it.)
The article began to flow, it rippled over the rocks and smoothed out the landscape rustling along the valley floor as if it knew which way to run, when they finished. My article gasped a sigh of relief at the loss in extra verbiage, the toning up of tense, and the sudden burst of energetic action that spawned vibrant new life. The peal of joy I heard at the abundance of authentication revealed yet another dimension of perfection.
Would my article have been published prior to the editorial massacre? Perhaps. No doubt, there would have been readers. I’m a writer. People like what I write. People obviously (you’re still here) read what I write. But… The edited version of the article was so much better. It sang, where the original simply hummed.
Critique groups offer many purposes. A good solid group of critiquers improve your writing, because they offer solid, sound revisional results you can count on for publication. These people get to know your voice, recognize your work, and passionately challenge you to improve. They learn to value your image as much as you value your presentation and they protect you from yourself. The bad news is, they still need you to have confidence in your work and pick and choose the changes you desire to make in your final work. Without your own confidence in your work, nothing they do is good enough to build confidence in you.
The limitations and restrictions you may feel when you first start working with a critique group lift off and give you wings after you’ve been there a while. Finding a critique group whom you can trust to be both honest and caring, may be the most difficult part of the critiquing process. But once you find a good fit, you’ll be happily trusting them with your work for years to come.