That's not the one at the Gail Borden Library, out in Elgin, is it? I've been to a few writing groups, but haven't been able to find the productive happy medium. They either do nothing but blow sunshine and everything everyone writes is wonderful and should be published as is no questions asked, or they are hurtfully and unnecessarily harsh. I attended one where they were cruel enough to make one girl cry. She was about 17-18 years old and they just ripped into her on a tirade about how the premise had already been done (which it had, but she incorporated some interesting twists.), they went after her on anything and every thing they could come up with and a couple more things I'm pretty sure they made up. Being thorough isn't a bad thing, but leaving her feeling like dirt and discouraged was the wrong way to go about it. Produtiveity doesn't mean constant pats on the back, but it also doesn't mean wrenching your heart from your chest and showing it to you while it still beats.
I wouldn't be where I am with my novel and my writing without the very talented, honest, and respectful writer's group that I was lucky to find two years ago. All groups have different dynamics and I fully encourage bailing from a negative experience. In our group, reading a paragraph is optional--most don't read in our group. Each person presents 12 pages and may ask for feedback on a particular aspect of the piece--i.e., dialogue or character development. Each member gets two minutes for verbal feedback on each piece, other feedback is written or given on google doc's. Pieces are not "taken apart" in any sort of free-wheeling style. I have found this particular group, although straightforward and honest, to be tremendously supportive. Critique groups shouldn't be competitive environments where people one-up each other, but instead safe environments for learning and getting better. Sounds like a smart move that you got out of your group if it wasn't helping you.
I grew up out there, but I haven't been back in years. I wonder If I still have any over due book fees. Do they still have the little art gallery down stairs?
I am not sure how long you've been away, but they built a new Library off of Kimbal street. Thing looks like a palace.
I think that forging a good relationship with the others in the group before entering the workshop helps a lot. That was my experience with a workshop I did. I loved pretty much every moment of our meetings, even when I disagreed with others (or some were just acting snobby). It helps to keep the atmosphere light-hearted and jokey, because it cuts down on arrogance. All this being said, it's quite easy to find a group of insufferable writers. The writing community often reminds me of the guitar community. Lots of people believe that they have the best techniques, equipment, and style. If you don't do things the same way as them, you're a leper.
I left Elgin in 2002. I knew G and J's was gone, but I hadn't heard about a new library building. I haven't even wanted to go back in the past 15 years, but now I'm thinking on Danny's pizza, Beef Villa and Al Faro's(the store on 31, not the place out on villa)
I just looked at some pictures of the new library, that is quite the building. Seeing they now have a cafe in there cracked me up, the librarians used to have a cow when I went in there with a bottle of Coke. I'm also cracking up at the juxtaposition of the public library right across the street from Bill O'rourk's hot rod shop(if that's still there). If I remember correctly, there was a Phillips 66 gas station on the corner, a print shop and the hotrod shop on the one side of the street and a bunch of rundown warehouses where the library now sits. Ya know... Between growing up on the river, Oak Street Beach and Fox Lake it's a wonder I never learned to swim.
This would drive me absolutely fucking insane. I certainly would've left to avoid toxicity and turning it into a debate club. Anyway, the important part about real-life workshopping seems to be finding the right group for you, which is a lot more difficult than sharing it online. For me I would probably not be comfortable with a group bigger than four, myself included. And like others have mentioned you need to get along well, but not so well that it dulls the critique. Definitely a lot more that can go wrong in other words.
In the context of the US, this argument boggles my mind because you're basically a melting pot of cultures. That was always really cool about your country. Aside from the Native American cultures, everything else is imported and appropriated already. I hope your critic considers if it's ethically okay to write anything else except what s/he is and has experienced. Better think twice before stepping even a little bit out of his/her life experience.
She usually likes my stuff and has gotten used to me writing women (actually one of my storylines she's really developed an attachment to despite the fact that her initial criticism was to question whether it was a good idea for me as a white male to write from the point of view of Yazidi women escaping the Syrian Civil War). It's just a consistent critique that I know I disagree with at the root level, so it's just a matter of developing the skill of "okay, file that one in the back of your head, ignore it, and take all of the other good critiques from the same person."
And the reason I haven't left is that the club is well moderated and if someone gets out of hand, they usually get piled on by everyone else. A few months ago the group leader actually shut down a guy who'd given the same critique of my work about ten times and when he launched into his fourteenth round of "You haven't taken my criticism, this book should not be set in the future at all," she told him that he'd said it every week for that last however many times and to stop. That's the important thing in a lot of groups - leadership that works.
Ah okay. If she's a Yazidi refugee and finds you writing about her culture unsavory, I'm surprised she doesn't want to help you more. Or maybe write about the subject herself? Seems like a story worth telling. I mean, if you were for some reason writing about a Finnish woman, I'd be happy to help... Not that I can speak for all of them.
I thought about joining a group once...but not only are there not any good ones even remotely close to me, I also don't think I'd learn very much or be able to contribute a whole lot either. I lose interest in anything other than straight up fantasy, and while I can offer some critique here and there on things outside that genre, on a regular basis it would soon get tiring to be expected to give input on stuff that's potentially not fantasy. If I could find a group that wrote fantasy that might be one thing...but I also have this fear that there might be either some elitist shit going on, or there would be way too many D&D issues and fanboy problems. Especially around my areas, I'd probably be dealing more with a comic book, Warhammer, trading card social club than an actual writing group. Not that I'm against such things, it's just hard to actually get any critiques done in between WoW gaming sessions. haha In the end, my main concern would be whether or not the people in said group were actually skilled and excellent writers, or if they merely acted like they were and simply blew smoke up each other's backsides. I need to grow as a writer, and I would expect to join a group that had at least 10% or more of its members to be published authors or with at least some recognition of skill from the book community as a whole. I would want to be learning, not constantly debating whether the other members were above or below my own level of writing ability. That's one thing that bothered me with a lot of the groups I looked into before joining this forum actually, I was considering joining a local group of writers, but couldn't determine if I'd be learning or not. I eventually decided to join a forum instead and was very interested once I saw that there were quite a few talented people on here. Spoiler: Off topic, and maybe sort of a rant. Yeah...about that. It seems we have a problem with our melting pot actually. Whenever the pot is stirred now, people get their knickers in a wad and start saying some pretty hateful garbage. It's always been under the surface before, and easy to tell if someone has some racism/gender/sexual preference opinions that are anything but politically correct. However, now that a certain someone has made their way into a certain House with a famous, or even infamous, white color...shit has hit the fan. Brexit didn't help either, and we (the US) looked to it as an example of sorts, believe it or not. It's not good, and reporting here from racist/bigot central, I'm sad to say that it's not only divided us, it's made it dangerous. The situation described by the Commandante would have still even been a mild one before the election...multiply it and bring the 5 down, then add a conceal carry license...that's the type of volatility we're dealing with now, from all sides.
Is that Gail Borden, the milkman? I'm old enough to remember when Borden's milk came in brown glass bottles that were left on your back doorstep. The cap was a cardboard disk you pulled out of the mouth and the milk wasn't homogenized. I loved it when I had table setting duty and it was time to open a new bottle. I'd make sure my mom wasn't looking, then pop that cap, stick my finger into the cream that rose to the top, and lick it off. Yum. (Sorry. OT on my own thread.)
She's not a Yazidi refugee, it's more a question of whether innately unethical to write from the point of view of another culture, especially if the author is white and therefore expropriating the culture of a colonized people from a position of privilege (we've had the same discussion about another protagonist who from the Faroe Islands and another writer's protagonist who is African-American) - but that's an ongoing debate in wider writing community writ large (with a majority generally saying it's better to encourage white writers to sensitively write more non-white characters but a substantial minority concluding that it is not appropriate for a white writer to include a non-white character as the MAIN character, because then it isn't their story to write - and I think my friend comes down on the side of not using any character outside one's own culture as the point of view character, which has come up when I've written European main characters as an American writer). But I really don't want to get too far down this rabbit trail.
Write what you want to write and if they don't want to read it, they don't have to. Pretty simple. Not like I needed to tell you that anyway. Tolkien expropriated hobbits, dwarves, orcs, and elves. Boo-hoo. What privilege. I hate people who say you're not allowed to write about other races. I hate people who frown upon white main-characters. The reality is they've got it wrong; your story isn't theirs to tell. Maybe they should consider allowing you to tell the story that you want to and make some critiques with substance? Glad to hear the moderator has a modicum of intelligence and backbone. And that, at the very least, they were able to offer you some *other* feedback that was actually not an absolute waste of time and energy. Add this to the list of reasons I dislike real-life critique groups. Kudos to you for disobeying it.
It may have been; the world keeps getting smaller and smaller. You can blame going off topic on me, though. I started the hijack. Sorry about that.
I feel more apprehensive about presenting my work face-to-face to a group of strangers than over the internet. The latter just feels less daunting. There's a particularly hits-close-to-home scene in my and @T.Trian 's WIP, and if people started telling me this is not how a person should feel or react in this situation, I'd find it hard to not get defensive. I'd probably burst in tears! But I can cope with it if I receive this feedback from an anonymous critter, or someone I know relatively well. A like-minded critique group would probably be the safest option, but then again, not so like-minded it becomes an echo chamber/circle jerk.
Easily dodge this face2face bullet here. All the authors are in big cities south of here, so no need to worry about finding a crit group in the middle of nowhere. (Also the majority of people have grammar here, that would drive any of you guys up a bloody wall (also their spelling leaves something somewhat to be desired).) So there are not a lot writers in the land of dirt and tumble weeds. I get enough flack on here, but I can handle it when it comes to my own work that I post. I got used to the idea I am not going to be the nest so bad its good writer out there. And thats fine. So having babbled on like bumbling person with ID10T syndrome, I really should get back to progressing the plot to a second book that no one will ever read.
It sounds like a really unpleasent experience @Catrin Lewis. I think with citique groups, it really depends on a person, not just if they are sociable but also what they look for in a critique. I have no negative emotional reaction to hearing that what I wrote didn't work, and often will ask a lot of detailed question about it, trying to tease out more detailed feedback. I'm specifically looking for things that didn't work, so I welcome criticism and it doesn't hurt me if people didn't get something. I use it to figure out how to get them to feel about my work the way I want them to feel. It also depends what you need the critique for, are you absorbed in finishing your manuscript, or are you dabbling in new storylines. For me, when I'm focussing on finishing a piece, I don't have much head space for others' writing, especially not bad writing, and I don't have time for critique from people who are ultimately more interested in getting feedback than giving it, because all you end up with are half-hearted opinions that arise from lack of interest or attention. So for me, the best critiques come from discerning and educated readers and as my stories progress, I prefer to get face to face feedback from people whose opinion I really trust.
Those are both signs of a bad group. I have posted this before about my critique group experience but here it is again: I tried 5 different groups before settling on one. The moderator knows his stuff. When someone suggests you should change the story you say thanks and ignore them. People are discouraged from chatting about critiques others are giving. Everyone gives their input one at a time and we move on to the next piece. It's not useful for members to discuss each other's critiques. Groups that didn't work for me: People read their piece out loud. The group members were all out of my league and the group leader was condescending. The group submitted 5K words online for people to review ahead of time, too time consuming. The group leader wasn't a good critic himself and good critics were there inconsistently. I'm at a point however, where I'm polishing and getting less out of the critiques. I really feel at this point that I can see how to improve the WIP without a lot of feedback. And it is time consuming to go. So I'm on a hiatus until I get a query written then I'll be back to get their feedback.
