Like newbie authors sometimes do, I started my writing career backwards. Way back in 2011, I wrote a manuscript. Characters with a story just begging to be told. 116,000 words of pure brilliance. When I was done I did a quick round of edits, then—isn’t she beautiful?—sent my baby out into the world. Like any proud mama, I entered her in contests, sat back and waited for the praise to roll in. Yeah, I see you rolling your eyes out there. You know what happened next.
Thankfully, not all of the judges were spitting mad that I wasted their time. At least a few had constructive, even helpful, comments and suggestions. Sure, they were still hard to take in the beginning, but this is where my stubborn German ancestry came in handy. This was not personal. This was business. Toughen up, Ruthie.
The bottom line was, I still liked my book. Still loved my characters. They deserved for me to do their story justice. I needed to be a better writer for them. So I joined RWA and my local-ish chapter. And I started taking workshops. Yeah—sigh—not until now.
Through networking on the loops and the many workshops I enrolled in, sometimes two or three at a time—so not recommended—I got an even better idea of what I did wrong in my book and, more importantly, how to fix it. Because I believed it was fixable.
For example, evidently my story really began on chapter four. Who knew? I resisted that change for months, but eventually realized that everyone had the same advice, so there must be truth to it. I nearly cried when I cut those pages. Of course I saved those beautiful words—I’d weave them into the story elsewhere, right? Nope. See? Smarter already. They’re still lost somewhere in my cut file, along with their 30,000 siblings. I had a lot to learn.
The next thing I did, and I vehemently believe this was the turning point in my writing, was I found critique partners. I put out an SOS through my chapter group and then on the RWA loop and had several responses. It was a process, delivering and receiving sample pages and sample critiques to find writers I was compatible with. But in the end I found two women who became like sisters to me.
Not like hair-pulling, one-upmanship kind of sisters, no. More like I love you but I’m going to tell you that sucks only because I don’t want you to embarrass yourself kind of sister. See? We had each others’ backs. Truthfully, we started our relationship a little more restrained than that. At first, we bounced ideas off each other, we shared links to cool websites, recommended workshops to each other. And read each other’s work.
We each write different genres and we each loved each other’s stories and writing voices. I think this is important to a critique partner relationship. You don’t have to write the same thing, but it’s important to enjoy what your partner writes. Sometimes we just needed help getting some aspect of a particular scene right, sometimes we sent out a few chapters to make sure we were going in the right direction. Sometimes we needed to get propped back up, because that day our writing sucked. If you’re a writer you know what days I’m talking about. We were together for years and have since all moved on in our careers, but their presence at the time was invaluable. If you don’t have a critique partner you love, it’s never too late to find one!
