Posted By Vonna on August 24, 2009

Yesterday I accomplished my goal for the summer: to complete the the novel I am currently writing. I need to have several chapters critiqued, but it’s still an accomplishment. I write from an outline that is more of a chapter by chapter synopsis. I have found that for me, polishing a few chapters and then getting started on critiques is an efficient and satisfying way to work. That way if something isn’t working out, I have plenty of time to adjust my outline before I have spent months perfecting my prose.

For those of you who don’t know, I write books for kids aged 9 to 14. I wrote my first book, a novel for adults, without the help of a critique group. This took a couple of years. When it was finished, I looked around for critique partners. I tried two different groups but their feedback was vague, the groups were too large and some of the members were unprofessional. I gave up and went back to writing solo.

When I finished my first book for the middle grade market, I decided to give critique groups another try. My third attempt was a success. I found a terrific evening group which was open to anyone who wanted to join. I still attend this wonderful group. The regular members were excellent writers and gave very good critiques, but they all wrote for adults. Another problem was that family matters often made it difficult to attend an evening meeting. Plus, since it was an open group, we could only bring five pages per week to have critiqued. Sometimes it took three weeks to get through one chapter. A few times there were so many people that I couldn’t even get a reading. But they were, and still are, worth the effort.

After working with this group for a year, I finished another draft of my first middle grade novel. I sent it to an agent who had enthusiastically requested the full manuscript. Two months later I got the manuscript back with a polite form letter. I realized I needed a critique group that was familiar with the children’s market.

I joined SCBWI and our regional critique coordinator did some scouting around for me. After a few weeks she found a group of writers who had recently lost one of their members, a published author, to an overseas move. They would be willing to interview me, although they had expressed a preference for a novelist who had already been published. She didn’t actually say the word “interview” but clearly that is what it was.

One representative from the group agreed to meet me at a tiny cafe in Houston’s Heights area, not exactly my neck of the woods. I took a copy of the prologue of my novel and arrived thirty minutes early.

I was met at the cafe by a petite and terrifying Published Author known to more courageous people as Kathy Duval (Three Bears’ Christmas, Three Bears Halloween, and I Think I See A UFO—to be released 2011) wearing soft casual clothes and cute earrings. We ordered at the counter then sat at a table the size of a muffin while we waited for her soup to arrive. The envelope with my manuscript in it looked huge and demanding on the miniature table. I swirled the yogurt in my bowl with my palms sweating, my heart racing and my carefully dried hair slowly frizzing as she took out my pages and read my prologue.

After three or four eternities, she looked up and calmly said, “That was very exciting. We’ll be meeting next Tuesday, how about coming to meet the rest of us and see how you like us?”

See how I like them? Yeah, right. But I had passed phase one, and since they had chosen her as their front man, the others weren’t likely to be as ferocious, I told myself.

I was wrong.

The first session went well. They read my prologue, the same scene Kathy had read. I was tongue-tied; they were kind.

The second session, Chapter 1… well. I thought I would bleed to death on the drive home. I couldn’t see for two or three days. Then my broken heart finally got up the courage to look at the critiqued pages.

It wasn’t so bad. They just wanted me to eliminate half of it. The first half that I had revised it a thousand times over the past three years. They wanted me to kill my darlings.

I grieved for a week and a half, then committed the bloody slaughter.

It worked.

I wish I could say that I happily accepted all their critiques from that day on, but it didn’t quite work that way. For months I drove home from our critique sessions in a fog of fury and despair. At first I needed a day or two before I could face my manuscript. Gradually the time it took my fog to dissipate got shorter and shorter. Finally the day came when I couldn’t wait to get home to make the changes my wonderful—Hey! When did that happen?—critique group had suggested.

Here is a picture of the Terrifying Ones at a lovely summer brunch hosted by Russell Sanders.

Left to right: Varsha Bajaj, Marty Graham, Russell Sanders, me, Kathy Duval Not pictured: Linda Jackson

Fearsome, what?

Categories: Writing, critique
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