Critique City

Critique groups are a writer's best friend. I fully believe that the second most profound thing I learned with my writing degree was the importance of workshop. (The first most profound thing being concision, which is another blog post entirely.)

Some people write for themselves, never intending another human being to read their work, and that's fine. However, there are a lot of writers out there who write specifically for other people to read. This is why I write. For me, my job as a writer is to translate my thoughts and visions to a page, then have that language translate back to thoughts and visions in a reader's head. Sounds creepy? It is, but who cares? It's fun to think someone else's thoughts for a while.

Sometimes it's hard to tell, though, where my mind is taking over for the details of my writing. It can be difficult to know where my implications are coming across to the reader and where I'm filling in the blanks automatically. That's where workshop comes in, or critique groups (same thing).

Getting outside eyeballs on my work is an invaluable part of my process. Without it, I wouldn't know which important questions I'm leaving unanswered for new readers. I wouldn't know what to elaborate on and what to cut from what I might have thought was a completed piece. Maybe I've finished my baby, but maybe that baby isn't doing its job right and needs to stop crying and start working because it isn't an actual baby it's a manuscript and maybe this metaphor is getting away from me.

Anyway. Critique is how I improve. It can be painful, but more than that, it's necessary for me.

On the other end of the spectrum is the act of critiquing. I have learned as much, if not more, from workshopping other people's writing than I have from getting critiqued. I learn what works for me as a reader and, more often, what doesn't. Each short story or manuscript that I examine brings me closer to mastering my own craft. I can't help but read and think things like, "Wow, that's a lot of past perfect. Wait, do I do this? I might do this." or, "This sentence is wonderfully descriptive, but there's a bit much going on. Reminds me of my first draft of…" Then I look over my own work and evaluate it against these new standards I've established.

I know what I like to read, but sometimes I don't know why. It isn't until I'm reading something that isn't clicking for me that I realize that why. It's all about survivorship bias.

The story goes like this: War planes were getting shot down in great numbers, so the higher-ups of the military looked at the planes that survived. The planes that survived had bullet-holes, so the higher-ups decided to put armor where the holes were (they couldn't do the whole plane because it would make the crafts too heavy). This didn't change the rate of downed planes. So, they brought in a statistician who told them to put armor where the planes hadn't been shot. Why? Because those bullets in the surviving planes weren't the problem, the holes in the planes that didn't return were.

Often times we look at the whole planes - the published novels - to learn to write. However, these workshop pieces are often the ones that haven't yet survived the culling process to fly in publishing - whether that's because they've been shot down or just haven't launched yet. With these stories, we can find those soft spots and find where to put the armor. If Stephen King is lambasted for using too many dialogue tags, you aren't going to fly just because you nix your tags - not if you haven't addressed all those adverbs you're abusing first. That would be like putting the armor on a surviving plane, but your work hasn't even flown.

Want to beat survivorship bias? Try joining a critique group. Shore up your vulnerabilities. Dodge the bullets. Fly.