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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34559
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34559
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I love critique groups. I have belonged to a number of them. I have good friends I met because of them. But if you are concerned about your storytelling, it is vital to realize what they can and can't do for you in regards to storytelling. To state it briefly, they can't help you with your story, but they may be able to help you with your telling.

Telling is the hardest part of the craft of writing, and it is made harder by the fact that most aspiring writers don't know that it is a problem. We worry that our story may not be interesting. We worry that our grammar or spelling may not be good. But it does not occur to us that the things we have chosen to write down may not be the things we need to say in order to give the reader the impression we want.

There is a reason for this, a cognitive bias called The Curse of Knowledge. It means that we forget very quickly what it is like not to know something and thus we can't figure out what we need to say to convey that information. This is a problem in non-fiction, but it is actually a worse problem in fiction, because the world and the people you are describing exist only in your head and if you do not tell the reader everything they need to know in order to see that world for themselves, then you are not going to get your story across to them. It might be the greatest story ever conceived, but if half of it stays in your head, it isn't going to work.

A critique group, a good one that is actually willing to critique, not just prise or edit, can help you figure out if you are telling well, not so much by what they say directly as by the difference between the impression they get from your story and the impression you expected them to get. But this is not actually where you will learn the most. You will learn the most from doing critiques of other people's work, providing you do them well.

When you critique someone's work you actually read through and think about a manuscript that you would drop out of boredom if you weren't critiquing. You will know pretty soon that you are not getting much from this MS, but you will be forced to read on and try to figure out why. This is where you start to sharpen your skill at detecting the curse of knowledge at work, the inability of the person to say the things that would engage you, that would let you enter into the waking dream of story.

Sharpening that ability to detect when the waking dream collapses is what you are after in a critique group. You get it partially from the critiques you get from others and partly (I think mostly) from the critiques you do of other people's work. This is where the time you invest in critiquing pays off. It's not just about paying for critiques, is actually where you learn to better detect the faults of your telling.

But here's the rub: This works much much better in person. It works much better if you can see the faces of the people who are critiquing you or receiving critiques, if you can ask questions and discuss what you or they are saying. You are much less likely to learn any of this in an online critique group.

But what this process will not tell you is whether your story is any good. The process is too spaced out for that. There is a chance that beta readers may tell you, but it can be very difficult to analyse why a flat story feels flat. We can talk about the shape of stories all we like, and it is all good valid stuff, but the impact of a shapeless narrative is merely boredom and disinterest. Rescuing a flacid story is a job for a story doctor, which is a very specific skill set you are not likely to find in your average beta reader.

In short, you can learn to improve your telling by learning what you need to say (and what you don't need to say) to get your vision into people's heads and a good in-person critique group can help you refine that skill (as can learning to read like a writer). But you go to the critique groups to learn to refine that faculty, not to improve individual works, and you learn it as much by critiquing as by being critiqued.

But the only way to know for sure that you have a good story is to publish it and see how many people buy. Good stories sell. In the end, that is the only measure that counts.

Original score: 7