Thanks To You All (Patricia Potter)

Yesterday was my critique group.

It’s always a humbling experience.

A few of the comments Friday:

“This is just plain stupid. No one would act like this.” (It seemed reasonable to me at the time.) Ah, talk about brutal honesty.

“Dammit, when are you going to learn the difference between might and may? (Probably never. I have a mental block. It’s hard to explain.)

“This is telling, not showing." (Well, I thought I WAS showing. Ah well).

"Where's the emotion here?" (In my head?)

“You changed his name again.” (And probably will ten more times before the darn book is finished.)

“You had these people leave the house three times and enter once.”
(Oops! Well I like goings better than comings.)

“You have the time at 3 a.m, and then again at 3 a.m. three hours later.” (Time DOES stop for people sometimes).

Humbled, I left. Three sets of suggestions. Three sets of criticism. Three sets of humiliation.

Why did I ever think I could write? Even after fifty books?

Aren’t critique groups wonderful?

They truly are, if humbling. My current group has been in existence about seven years. My former group lasted nearly ten years before I left Atlanta, leaving part of my heart behind.

A critique group is like a marriage. You have to have the right chemistry but when you have that wondrous magic, there is nothing better. I truly don’t know what I would do without mine.

We are four in number, three published in fiction, one a successful writer and producer of mystery dinners. We are friends, sisters, supporters of each other, crying towels at times, helpmates at others. We are there when a husband/father/mother/child gets sick. We work overtime when someone’s on deadline. We catch each other’s writing foibles, sympathize with a poor cover or a case of writer’s block. When someone has a plot problem, we devote an afternoon to solving it. We are family.

We meet every Friday morning for breakfast at the local Pancake House. We order the same thing every Friday, and we always have the world’s best and most patient wait person. He has the coffee and tea (with extra lemon for Carolyn) ready the second we enter. He often submits orders before we arrive. He knows us well.

But back to Friday’s session. The new book has been rolling along and, until Friday, had met relatively little criticism (for me). Wow, I was feeling good about myself. Then Friday hit!

I always give them raw pages, stuff written quickly and often not edited. I write like that. I like to run through the first draft, then spend time fixing. It’s called writing by the seat of your pants.

This book – a suspense in a series linked only by a loose connection to an Atlanta newspaper – had gone unusually fast. Perhaps because there are four main characters and when I get blocked with a character in one scene, I can switch to another. By the time I finish that scene, the problem is usually worked out with the first. I really like doing multiple characters for that reason.

But this Friday was brutal.

Oops. Need to step back. Rewrite that chapter and then get back in the rhythm.
Thank God for a critique group.

That brings me to what I really meant to write about this week, and that’s friends. There has been much talk about blessings and resolutions at the end of ‘07 and the beginning of ‘08. I've neglected to mention the greatest blessing of all.

I’ve frequently mentioned friends because they are such a tremendous part of my life. Not only my critique group, but my blog family and other writers I've met through my twenty years of writing. The friendships are deep and enduring.

We writers are a particular breed. We are introverts who long to be extroverts. We live in our own worlds much of the time, and it’s a lifestyle difficult for non-writers to understand. They often don’t realize we actually work for a living, that an interruption isn’t just a five minute call but a major rupture of concentration that may take hours to get back into the character’s mindset.
It’s also hard to understand the anxieties we have. About contracts, about covers, about sell through, about our own expectations for our books

It's vital then to know there's people there who understand. Who don't feel you're entirely neurotic, though you probably are, and who understand the eccentricities that come along with our creative drive. Who are always there in good times and bad. Who will tell the brutal truth, only because they want you to be the best you can be.

I'll always be so grateful that writing has given them to me.

So thanks to you all.