This post first ran on April 25, 2013. Today I'm talking about critique groups, specifically the sort where work is presented in small bites rather than having someone evaluate an entire manuscript. The ideal critique group has people who write as well or better than you do, and understand your genre. Members should agree to a schedule for submitting and giving feedback. They should be willing to accept the positive and the negative, and understand that if several people have problems with an aspect of the work, it deserves rethinking no matter how good you think it is. Critique groups can be Face to Face, or they can be done online. I've done both, although now I'm with a small (3 member) online group. Face to Face gives you a chance to discuss critiques in more depth. One of my constant questions as a beginner was, "Am I writing it wrong, or are you reading it wrong?" because I thought I knew what I meant to say, and needed to know where I'd gone wron...

How to Take Criticism, or How I Learned to Stop Plotting the Deaths of My Critique Group Members and Love Their Feedback Instead Image by Mr Clementi , via Flickr I’ve been a member of a critique group for almost a year. In that time, they’ve helped me slog through the second draft of one manuscript, helped me plot my next story, and advised me on the first draft of a new manuscript. They often give me specific feedback that I don’t like. They tell me my characters’ motivations are muddy, my sentence structure is clunky, and I don’t show enough of my protagonist’s reactions to events. When I used to hear these criticisms, it’s not that I necessarily wanted to murder them, I simply daydreamed about interesting accidents that may or may not befall them. Just daydreaming… I’m not a monster, after all. But all that murderousness abated when I learned how to leave my ego at home. My words are my teeny tiny textual babies. They are sacred to me. When I pour my blood, sweat, an...