Surprising How Constructive Critique Can Be

So here we are five months into 2011 and I’m just now putting out some editing feelers once again. As far as I was concerned, my manuscript was essentially finished. All I needed was an audience and then I’d get my agent and presto!

Part of the process in getting an audience is participating in online forums, and one of the ones I’ve been a member of for at least a year is absolutewrite.com. I decided to see what some of them might think of my work, so I started posting in the “Share Your Work” area. The response was spectacular!

Some liked my prologue a great deal but felt it needed some work. I was able to use their suggestions and produce a revision in a very short time.

I then posted my first chapter. The response was again spectacular, but not so much because of the oos and ahs but because just about every critique landed on something I had been unsure about. Again with their help I was able to post a revision very quickly.

I followed with my second chapter, and the response was spectacular in yet another way. Some didn’t like it at all, didn’t know where I was headed. They expected a build-up to a scene I described in the prologue leaving me wondering surely you can’t think that’s all there is to my story. I adjusted the prologue to remove the misdirection.

Then someone went to town on my chapter. They crossed out line after line totally gutting what I’d written. But what they left intact was the core story, and that meant everything.

It’s easy to rewrite sentences and paragraphs and pages. It’s damn near impossible to do much of anything without a story, and as ruthless as the critique may have appeared to be, it was superficial.

I’ve since gone through the section and discovered two issues. One, the section was a hack-up; I’d recently split the chapter due to length. Two, there was a timeline flaw that needed to be fixed anyway. The result? A leaner, tighter couple of chapters that elevate my story towards the Holy Grail.

Thanks!