I recently joined a critique group. That's where a bunch of writers get together and critique one another's work. Ahead of time will each sacrifice ten or so pages to the collective wit and wisdom of the group, then we get together for a few hours and talk about the good and the bad.
This is an invaluable tool for a writer!
In the past, I've belonged to several critique groups. Unfortunately, they were mainly the blind leading the blind. We were all quite willing, but not sure what consitituted good work.
This time is different. The first meeting I learned more about dialogue tags than I'd heard since starting on my writing adventure. It was like having a curtain pulled back. The angels sang. Yep, it was really that good.
I fixed the pages that were critiqued and scoured the pages I was going to turn in for dialogue boo boos. Of course, I thought everyone would cry eurika, jump up and down and say, "Send this in immediately to publish!"
As my daugher would say, le sigh.
A whole other layer of ways to kick up my work to a professional level was laid out. Honestly, afterwards I was pretty discouraged. It took me a week to get up the nerve to attack the problems...but this weekend is critique time, no more putting things off.
Yesterday I dug in. Wow. I got so into what I was doing I missed a dentist appointment. And you know what? I'm thinking it looks pretty good. I'm all set to go back to the critique group and learn how to do it better. Either that, or everyone will jump up and down...
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