How to Deliver a Writer’s Group Critique*

This is a wry but honest series of observations on the peculiarities of human behaviour that sometimes distract us from the true path of offering good advice to other writers. Frankly, there are as many opinions of how to do this properly as there are members of my group, but this is my take.

Delivering a good critique is not all about nailing all the defects in a piece of writing. Everyone is different, and how person on the end of the critique will receive this information should determine the way it is delivered. So, as well as being experts at communicating ideas to on the page, we need to use emotional intelligence to determine the best way to deliver the critique to someone we probably know well.

There are all too human quirks that we all possess to some degree that need some attenuation to deliver a good critique. Most of these are traits that I have observed in myself, both in giving and receiving critiques. It is useful to identify the tell-tale signs in terms of their outward manifestation so that we can identify these tendencies in ourselves as we slide over the rim of the fiery pit of self-indulgence!Receiving the critique is like having red-hot coals inserted into your brain. Receiving a critique is nonetheless a good thing. How can this be? The trick is to listen to what’s being said, establish exactly what the critiquer is saying, then move on. This is easier said than done. I’ve observed mature and well-adjusted people either close to tears or wailing in despair (mostly me) during this process, so it’s important to remember what it’s all for.

No matter how perfect we think our story is, it’s quite likely that unless we’re God’s-Gift to the literary world, there will be many issues that need attention. The aim is for a group of writers, used to searching for errors in their work, to do the same with our own work. If they are doing their job properly, they will find a lot of areas of concern. There are two reasons for this: we will have become overfamiliar with our own work, and also because their strengths and weaknesses will be different to ours. This applies equally to published writers and those of us still toiling in the foothills.

Critiquing in a writers’ group follows two principle pathways: a considered written review and a discussion face to face. However, both methodologies are susceptible to being handled badly by the unprepared critiquer and critiquee. The individual being critiqued needs to be aware of the potential pitfall of not being receptive to criticism, in which case all the hard work of the rest of the group will have been in vain. Equally important though is the need for those delivering the critique to fulfil the primary objective of this process: to assist with improving the work of the recipient. What can interfere with this process?

Let’s deal with the most obvious and overarching problem: to forget that the objective is to help the recipient. The job is not to merely find fault, but to pick out the areas that need attention, and present them in a way that will help the writer to improve. Bombarding the writer with a blizzard of petty faults  will not help this process; they’ll just switch off and move on to the next issue. Far better to pick out one or two glaring examples. This principle applies to writing defects large and small, but you’re wasting your time by flagging them all up without supplying underpinning evidence.

But this is not about what, specifically, these individual faults might be…

All common sense, you might say, but if we drill deeper, what areas get in the way of following this simple principle? The answer is, unsurprisingly, human nature.

When we start to review another person’s work, one emotion we experience is relief. It is our opportunity to remind ourselves that others in the group are human after all. If not properly checked, this relief can give way to overconfidence: the conviction that surely this evidence of fallibility must be the result of one’s superior writing skills. The horses are then in danger of bolting in the direction of showcasing one’s own skills, rather than gently guiding the perhaps fragile ego of the recipient in the right direction! Rather like the Roman Emperors of glory past, we need to have a slave standing on the footplate of our chariots whispering in our ears to remind us that we are merely human.

Character clashes can get in the way of delivering an objective critique. There seems to be no such thing as a generic writing personality: we are as diverse as the society we occupy. As a result, we might enter into the process with a preconceived notion of the kind of faults we are looking for and our comments can be coloured by our view of the individual. This also works in reverse, of course, and we might be susceptible to judging a friends work more favourably. Whilst this is common practice in the book endorsement world, we should try to hold ourselves above such pettiness. We are not helping our friends by giving a ringing endorsement to a book that everyone else judges as flawed. Furthermore, that friend will not be able to trust you to deliver an objective view on later critiques.

Some purists, be they of grammar, history, logical consistency, or setting out on the page, become overheated in the process of reviewing a piece of work. We are usually out of our comfort-zone, not only in terms of writing style, but also of genre. As a result, quite naturally, the process of hacking though unrelenting pages that we are not necessarily enjoying, generate a tension. If we then encounter one or more problems in the course of reviewing the work, our language can become more emotive and more combative.

Closely related, and perhaps linked to the above, is the critique that’s been completed with a side order of beer/whisky/Merlot: name your brew. The symptoms are similar to the foregoing and can slide further towards hyperbole as the evening progresses. Yes, I do like a drink now and again!

These problems can be easily be remedied once we acknowledge they can potentially exist. We have an obligation to do the best job we can for the others in the writing group. As someone said to me recently, it is a high complement just for someone to want to read your work, whatever the basis. The simple solution to all these problems is to reread and edit before sending.

None of this relieves the recipient of the responsibility of intelligently interpreting the critique, no matter how painful the process. Very few people will undertake a critique with the intention of doing anything other than giving good and helpful advice.

As a worst-case scenario, I have read, though not personally experienced, instances of what I call the nil-sum reviewer. Such people populate the internet, especially online review sites and chat-rooms. I have heard stories about such a person in a writing group saying to another “Well if you managed to get that published, then we’re all in with a chance”. The objective here was denigrate others work in order to elevate his or her own. The giveaway here is when the reviewer leads with a value laden judgement of the piece, clearly designed to have an emotional impact rather than something to help the recipient.

Each member of the group will learn from the experience of critiquing. The process of spotting problems within a piece of writing serves to consolidate our existing understanding of writing techniques, as well as affording the opportunity to learn a few new tricks in the area where the subject writer excels. Critiquing work is therefore as much a part of the normal writing day as much as any other work production.

The vital final stage of submitting a critique is to re-read, especially the inline comments, on a later occasion. Have I been heavy handed in communicating that point? Am I needlessly using emotive language in putting that point across? Do the comments I’ve made represent my overall view of the MS – is the criticism proportionate? It only takes a few extra minutes to carry out this check. Overriding all of this is the consideration that you are helping the subject of the review, not airing your own knowledge or trying to identify every single error. To forget this simple principle risks doing more harm than good.

Good writing is not undertaken fearfully. The imagination of good writer is uninhibited and the ideas will flow directly onto the page unencumbered by self-doubt or the fear of harsh criticism. The overall objective of a writer’s critique is to improve the quality of the subjects writing by offering constructive advice. Clearly, the critique has to be honest, even if that means delivering unexpectedly bad news. But the tone and method of that message is key to the difference between a good and a bad critique. 

Oliver Randle

7 May 2019

* (as painlessly as possible without losing the message)

Diary of an Accidental Naturalist

Earlier that morning

Part of the pod

The watchman

Something people always seem to do on the way home from holiday is to work out what was the best bit.  I won’t bore you with my holiday reminiscences— except for the one memory turned out to be the ‘signature’ moment.  It was an unscheduled animal encounter.We did all the tourist bits.  We had to visit Kruger Park; one of the few unsullied and un-repopulated wild animal domains that at least approximated the original habitat and animal populations.  The animals mostly carried off their roles competently:  the solitary bull elephants were irritable old men, who barely acknowledged our presence in Land Rovers two hundred meters away; the white rhinos peered at us myopically from between the scrubby bushes and baobab trees; the giraffe affected the unconcern of elegant old ladies waiting for their turn at a tea-dance.What happened to us on the morning of the last day was undoubtedly the high-spot and the keynote of our ‘extended family’ holiday.  One automatically reaches for superlatives when trying to describe what it’s like to come into close contact with whales, but I’ll attempt to resist the temptation.We were lucky to be given hotel accommodation right on the shoreline of Table Bay, between Sea Point and Bantry Bay, for those who know the area. The emerald expanse of the South Atlantic stretched from almost below our balcony to a crystal sharp horizon several miles distant.Patches of giant kelp carpet the sea floor and the white sand beneath is visible to depths of forty meters and more. So, we were packing up to return to England, yesterday morning, and something caught my eye just twenty or thirty meters off-shore. A glistening jet of water was propelled into the air by something just below the surface.  Then I saw the great dark shape outlined around it, silhouetted in the clear, sparkling water.  Then I saw another, then another.  I shouted to my family in the apartment: ‘Whales here! Now!’  The family cascaded onto the balcony area, tripping over the ankle- level recliners.  I focussed my camera on the nearest one: a large male, over twenty meters long and with a nose encrusted with orange barnacles.Whales engender the strangest emotions.  A kind of fusion of sadness and joy.  A feeling of a spiritual connection that perhaps has its origins in a shared primal ancestry and common purpose: to stay alive in spite of everything. The whales, Southern Right-Whales, shouldn’t have been there. They are supposed to be viewable in the bay during mating season, from October onwards.  But then, thanks to our elevated location, we saw something that several other casual onlookers on the shore may not have noticed.  A long black, wavering ribbon wove a path parallel to the shoreline, about a hundred meters out.  At first, I thought it was kelp.  Then I noticed it was moving almost imperceptibly slowly from left to right across the shoreline.  It was a large pod of those massive creatures, apparently migrating, before our eyes.  Nose to tail, line astern, big and small they followed one another in what must have been a seasonal migration.  A large shadow at the front of the ribbon indicated the head of the procession and then smaller black shadows followed, many only a meter or so long in the middle of the order.Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of our luxury and comfort alongside an ancient and timeworn ritual.  We were awe-struck in the face of these many giant creatures enacting a rite that evolution commanded them to fulfil, and felt uniquely privileged that only we of all the residents of Cape Town seemed to have noticed the stately progress of the giant black ribbon up the coast.  We, as a species, have a presumed arrogance.  Whether it is benign, as in the case of environmentalist concerns, where we try to wind-back the depredations of civilisation and restore a life and dignity to the creatures we share the planet with, or, the unthinking and ill-considered policy edicts of a president that puts populist short-term financial issues above all else; these creatures will keep on doing what they have done for millions of years.I took photographs of course, just to prove to myself that I was not imagining it. But photographs are the reflection of a memory, and the experience itself buoyed us up as we regretfully left our holiday accommodation behind. The Airbus that flew us out of Cape Town that morning flew over the sunlit bay and there, below us, were two distinct dark shapes, presumably still shepherding their brood past the Great Whites that ring Robben Island hunting for seal.  Sometimes holiday memories fade quite quickly, but we won’t be forgetting this one in a hurry. Oliver

My Holiday of Calm Reflection

Oliver_Blog_Picture

My Holiday of Calm ReflectionI was on holiday with three families with children, all variously related to me in some way through either birth or marriage and so was tempted to write about my holiday in the lakes area of the French Massif Central.Its dramatic peaks and crags and swooping drops to great volumes of probably even deeper lakes below induce a kind of existential calm. The internet only worked after a lot of jiggery-pokery and phones not at all, effectively severing whatever umbilical connection we had to stressful Britain. I have little doubt that the countryside in deepest mid-France worked its magic on all of us.But freeing the brain to wander in this way can lead to dangerous territory. For instance, what was it about everyday life that breaks that vital connection with the natural world, the real world? Why do we allow our own personal striving and everyday concerns get in the way of really caring for one another? Because that is what we seem to be doing in order to get on in life. I have little doubt that there are very useful Darwinian survival principles underlying the imperative to narrow down the focus of care and concern to those in our immediate family. In times of stress and danger, we need to protect those closest to us. Ultimately, when the wolf comes to the door, we have to save ourselves.But that was then, and this is now. If we just follow our natural inclinations without allowing our intelligence to intervene, we eat high calorie foods and bloat out to unhealthy proportions. When we follow the news media, we select the tastiest themes and narratives that support our preconceptions about the world and this serves to deepen our prejudices, instead of challenging and perhaps overturning them. Why should we care more about others if it is going to cost us more money? Why should we buy into the notion of anthropogenic global warming if it’s going to cost us money and damage my lifestyle? Last night I spent some time with a group of friends with similar interests. We established that we all had come from different parts of the British Isles. We have a diversity of outlooks, and probably represent every colour on the political rainbow. We all had writing in common and this factor was the conduit for sympathy, for personal tragedy, and hilarious recollections concerning the disastrous character of many foreign toilets. And in between these things, we found time to deliver mutual support and advice on personal writing issues. The big difference was that we all knew one another, understood each other’s problems and wanted to help. But this is not where we as a society are going, so it seems. These little caches of human concern and compassion are counter-cultural and develop in the face of exhortations from larger society for more production and less waste. More exploitation and damn the cost. More selfish accrual of wealth and devil take the hindmost.This is not the kind of society I want to live in, but I very much do want to be a part of the kind of society that cares for its members in the way that WordWatchers looks after the constituent members of the group.There is no reason why we as a society shouldn’t face up to the simple fact that too much greed and selfishness serves us all badly. It’s just that we’re all too busy, or too lazy, or too greedy to make these choices, and we expect politicians to do it for us. Oliver.