When you pick a significant other, you might hope that you don’t go into the relationship intending to critique each other. But writers join writing groups or writing partnerships intending to be critiqued. It then makes sense that we need to assess the skills of the people whom we’re considering for the position of BWFs (Best Writing Friends).

To whit:

• How good are they at writing?
• Have they actually published anything? This isn’t a deal breaker, though; I’ve known people who have great eyes, but haven’t published. It is a data point to consider, though.
• How gentle are they with my work? With my feelings? I might want them to rip my work apart, but I don’t want them to rip my soul out of my body and convince me I have no business owning a pen.
• How are their oral communication skills? It’s great if these people are geniuses, but can they convey some of that to me?

One of my friends is in a writing group where they actually do line edits of each other’s work. Oh lord, that would not be the group for me. But this group is dedicated to publication. They intend that their members take the reviewed piece and send it out. What a great service!  And sometimes they rip the work down to its bones. Just as I might not understand how my best friends put up with their significant others, some people might not fathom how writers could put up with such brutal feedback. To even be in the group you have to be published. You have to apply to this group. And it has a waiting list to get in.

Now another friend is in an online class, working away at honing her craft. Many online classes work as workshops, where the participants critique each other. Others work as traditional classes, where only the instructor comments on the participants’ writing.

I used to teach such courses, but I found that I really missed the personal interaction: the nonverbals, the interaction between the students, the spontaneous generation of creativity that happens when you have a group of writers together in the same room. And I found that critiques are often best shared in a situation where you can make eye contact and adjust your tone based on how the writer-to-be is receiving it.

Hearing someone’s feedback on your passion is difficult enough without putting it in the sterile medium of a digital dropbox where a detached reviewer responds in pixels on a page. Thank heavens our childhood dreams aren’t handled that way, or I might have never gotten the encouragement to pursue mine.

Instructor/mother: Please transmit life dream via dropbox.

Student/5-year-old Wendy: I want to be a mother bird.

Instructor/mother: This is not a saleable concept. This genre does not exist. You need to start over and work with what you know. Can you even fly?

Our next meeting will be on Sunday, April 21 at 2 p.m. Please feel free to invite friends. Just drop me a note to let me know how many to expect!

Bring about seven minutes’ worth of material to read and $5 for the kitty. (Come early if you want to enjoy Olive’s breakfast buffet.)

See you Sunday!

Want to know more about us? Check out these links:

The Arts of Being Critiqued and Critiquing Other People’s Writing

Where Do We Learn to Criticize Others?
(Please note that the dates in that last one are from previous years.)

Bring $5 for the kitty and more for your tummy, and about seven minutes’ worth of writing to share. Or you can just bring your ears if you’d like to sit in on a meeting before you venture into reading your own work. Either way, we’d like to see you there!

Then the self-publishing world exploded and in so doing became a little more respectable. Unfortunately, along with that came a bunch of companies that took advantage of writers who were unfamiliar with how to get published traditionally, who were too impatient to climb up the rungs of traditional publishing, who wanted to control their own publishing process, or (yes) who had written something that wasn’t ready for publication but wouldn’t take “no” for an answer.

Self-publishing can be the perfect answer for people whose books are of interest to a limited audience or who want to be able to control the entire experience, but you need to do your homework when choosing the company that’s going to help you do that. (If you want a sickening look at the dregs of this industry, read Ten Percent of Nothing: The Case of the Literary Agent from Hell by former FBI agent Jim Fisher.)

After a while, it was still somewhat easy to tell who the self-publishing companies were. It became difficult when the less ethical companies changed names once they got a bad rep among writers. For example, did you know that AuthorHouse used to be 1st Books? Well, it turns out that Author Solutions owns a lot of the less-than-savory self-publishing companies: iUniverse, Trafford, AuthorHouse, xLibris. Many of us relied on sites like Preditors and Editors to keep track of who was on 1st and what they were calling themselves now.

Now the plot sickens. Simon & Schuster has entered the self-publishing business. And they’re partnering with Author Solutions to do it. David Gaughran describes it all in Simon & Schuster Joins Forces With Author Solutions To Rip Off Writers.

I have to say that I’m not going to think of S&S the same way again. It would be as if I’d found out that Women Writing for a Change had acquired Hustler.

There are many respectable self-publishing companies out there, like Orange Frazer Press Custom Books and Queen V Publishing. Author Solutions just isn’t one of them.

We’re going to talk about how to get your writing in the best shape for submitting it to editors and agents (and contests, too!). I read some great stories and can’t wait to meet the authors. Some of the things we’ll be discussing are manuscript format, action verbs, punctuation and style guides.

For example, did you know that you’re supposed to put only one space at the end of a sentence and after a colon? Do you know when that standard changed? In the mid-1980s. Want to know why? Well, you’ll have to invite me to talk to your group to find out!

Most of us eat lunch; if you get there early enough before 2 p.m. you can eat from the yummy breakfast buffet. By the way, Olive’s has a new chef, so they have slimmed down their menu while they make the transition (I refuse to use “transition” as a verb; I’m that much of a curmudgeon). Yes, the veggie naan is gone. But you’ll love what’s still on/the menu.

That’s why I’m not a poet.
See you Sunday!

Today, August 5, at 2 p.m., we are holding our monthly Writing Workshop Workshop at Olive’s at the Ludlow Garage. If you’re interested in workshopping a sample of your writing, please come. If you’d like to hear some great writing, please come. If you’re thinking about writing, please come.

Please come.

Bring seven minutes’ worth of material to read, $5 for the kitty and (most important) you.