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...not until our fellow writers tell us it's there, do we see it...
Until you name yourself Writer, you will never be a writer.
Make a place for your writing, a sacred place...
How to get started writing? Write.
Once, with another woman …
Something stolen
While you were driving
These were my mistakes
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Read and critique is a way - possibly the only way - for writers to hear how their writing sounds to others. This is how we discover whether what we scratched out on the page in our dim room under the waning moon, and fingered in, letter by letter, while the computer screen glowed silver against our slack mouths and glazed eyes, whether this piece we so painstakingly and painfully created and re-created works. Whether our crumpled ideas and manhandled images make any sense at all to anyone who isn't inside our own heads. God knows we've lost all sense of perspective.
Read and critique is how we regain that perspective. Or a new perspective that allows us to go further and into places we never knew existed. Sometimes what we didn't even know we knew appears on the page, but not until our fellow writers tell us it's there, do we see it.
How can we ever know whether that great idea we had (or so it seemed at the time) made it to the page unless someone else tells us? We are too close. We are inside. What we think is there may be there only in our woolly heads.
Also we can never hear our work for the first time. We have written and rewritten and edited and polished and then started over so many times that nothing is new to us. Our objectivity gets lost amidst the drained coffee cups, crumpled candy wrappers, and chewed nails of our own review.
Read and critique is the place where all the repetition, the clichés, the same boring sentence structure, the passive voice, the misplaced modifier, all this and more comes to light. This is the place, among a roomful of trusted and supportive writing colleagues, where all the nits get picked and the warts exposed. And, if yours is a good read and critique group, you also get to hear from these objective colleagues what is working, where your digging really struck pay dirt, what new and exciting directions your piece can take. This is the place we get confirmation that we are writers and, never mind how much is left to be done, that our work has value.
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