by Elsie J. Thorn alias Emi (ICL) or Mel (LRWG)

You overcome your "closet writer" syndrome problem and give your best friend your story to read, one that you’ve sweated over for weeks. You ask her to be honest in her criticism. She says, "Oh, that’s great! I wish I could write." Emboldened by this seemingly positive feedback, you let two trusted family members read it. You get, "Not bad. When did you take up this writing stuff?" They smile indulgently when you explain you are seriously looking for both positive and negative commentary, as you are hoping to sell your work in the freelance market. You ask them about the description and the characterization in your piece, but they have little more to offer that is useful to you.

Something like the situation I have just described was my experience the first time I looked for good critique. Perhaps it sounds familiar to you. I wondered how I was going to find people who had my hopes of publishing and understood the kind of feedback on my work that I was looking for.

During one of the Longridge Writers Group forums, Mary Rosenblum, the web editor, was discussing critique groups. There were many questions. Are they beneficial? How do they work? Where can I find a group that writes what I write? How can I join one? Can such groups be done using the chat feature at the Institute? Because of the interest and obvious need for critiquing groups online, Mary offered to set up groups if we submitted our names to her with information on what genres we wrote, and whether we were able to receive attachments through e-mail. Mary then formed groups of people that wrote similar material.

I became part of a group of ten critiquers. We’re a mixture of Longridge and ICL students. We all write short nonfiction and fiction pieces, and many of us are working on novels as well. Some of us have published work, while others have not yet. We started by sending each other brief autobiographies by way of introduction. Most of us included our writing experience.

Our first meeting was in the LRWG auditorium. From there we migrated to a "private" chat room. There was no designated "leader". As with most groups, there was a bit of chaos and jockeying around until we decided we needed to be organized. In our case, there were a few "organizers". The ten of us eventually came to an agreement about when we would meet online and how we would conduct our meetings. We decided to call ourselves Word Wizards. Time zones became important. The meeting time had to be fair to all. We decided we could critique two pieces per session. Two of us volunteered our work for the next meeting, about a month later. We all had each other’s e-mail addresses. The volunteers sent each person in the group their chosen critique piece well before the next meeting. We all critiqued the two pieces and sent our comments back via e-mail, either pasted into an e-mail message or as an attachment. We had decided that it would make for far too long a session if each of us did a full live line by line critique of each piece online. Hence, the e-mailed critique. Each volunteer could make corrections and send that changed version to each group member again, if he or she wished, before the next meeting. In that case, our online remarks would be directed at the changed version.

At the second meeting, we each took a turn to add anything more to what we had already said in the original or edited returned piece. There was a great deal of talking back and forth, and we soon decided we needed a better way of conducting our online sessions to control our "itchy fingers" as one wag in our group put it. We chose the Clarion Style, a critiquing method we had all read about in our pre-meeting input material which we had received from Mary and some of our own group members. Each person gives his or her critique of a particular work. The author is not allowed to say anything during this time. At the end, after everyone is done, the author can rebut, argue or explain. We have found this combined method of doing the major critique by e-mail and using the online meeting as a summation time with the Clarion method the most orderly and useful way of critiquing. So far, we have had three good critiquing sessions of about an hour each, two of them using the Clarion method.

The e-mailed critique covers everything from grammatical, syntactical and spelling errors to remarks about characterization, theme, description, plot, beginnings and endings. Our tone in both the e-mailed and the online critique is warm and supporting, never rude or acerbic, although we are not afraid to make honest, challenging remarks. The aim is to be mutually helpful and to make our critiquing sessions worthwhile as we all work toward our common goal of having our work published.