Different drummers

[leethet]

Just got back from a writers group meeting. Sigh. It's taken me this many years to train my cohorts in comprehending the basics of fantasy fiction (they all write mainstreamish thriller or historical fiction). Much as I appreciate their efforts (they're good people and they try), I'm well aware they're not helping me as much as I need; they're simply unaware of the conventions (and the cliches) of fantasy fiction. I need people familiar with my genre, both so I don't have to explain that things are sometimes done supernaturally and so that they can help me with avoiding cliche. They often are stumbling so over the trees that they can't look at the forest. Sigh ... I expect in return I'm not much help in their genres, for the same reason. Cross-genre reading is good, but I'm not sure it's not better overall to critique and be critiqued in a group of like-genre writers.

Comments

Re: Thanks!

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I don't know how Critters works--they have a reviewing queue of some sort. I know there are people on livejournal who are in Critters, and I hear stories from them of getting twenty or thirty crits on one piece--which I think is a little excessive.

The OWW system I can speak from personal experience: One does four crits to get the points to post a piece. Most of us who are serious about it do 'extra' crits--because that's a way to build relationships, to follow stories we're interested in, or just to keep up with what friends are doing. Crits can range from a detailed line edit to a few paragraphs of reader reaction and suggestions.

I have some novel chapters now, and have had about six people critting each of them, but I have in the past done a lot of critting myself. It seems that most posted stories wind up with between three (The workshop is set up to try and ensure that everything posted gets at least three crits) to ten responses.

I find that a very community-oriented approach has worked well for me.

However, crits aren't assigned--essentially, one's free to browse the workshop until one finds something appealing and then review it at one's leisure.

For me, perseonally, I've found that *doing* the reviews is a better learning tool than receiving them. Reading a lot of not-very-polished prose starts to make the not-very-polished bits of one's own prose stand out.

It is like anything in that you get what you put into it--I don't think it's a particularly useful resource for, say, turning a story that doesn't work into a story that does. But it's worked really well for me as a resource for turning a **writer** who isn't writing pro-level fiction into a writer who is.

Given, you know, two or three years and some concerted effort.

"If it was easy, it wouldn't be fun," right? *g*

There's also a Yahoo groups mailing list and an AIM chatroom.