My Critique Group

My critique group and I gave a talk last night to my parent’s social club, discussing our critique process and sharing fun stories of our fourteen years together. It was so much fun and the people who attended were interested and asked lots of probing questions. We all agreed, it was a great success, which is good, because I was anxious about it.

You see, I spoke to the group last year, by myself. I told them about me, about my books, and my writing process, as well as my path to publishing. And probably to give my dad a hard time, since he and my mom were in the audience, and he’d been worried I was going to read a sex scene (which I didn’t), I decided to have a little interactive fun. I told the audience there were two things necessary when writing a sex scene—consent and condoms. And then I asked them to help me fix the scene if either of those two things were left out.

The group thought it was hilarious, my dad turned bright red (and probably wished I’d decided to read that sex scene instead), and everyone learned the lesson I was trying to teach—sex scenes, when done correctly, are really difficult to write, especially if you want them to fit your writing style, not be superfluous, and have a purpose (you know, besides the obvious).

At the end of that presentation, the women who organized it begged me to come back this year, and because I say yes to everything, I agreed. But since I couldn’t repeat my presentation, I had to come up with something new. Enter my critique partners. But I still wanted our talk to be fun and engaging, even if we weren’t improving a sex scene.

Thankfully, it went well. Of course, they’ve asked me to come back next year, and now I’m totally stumped. But at least I’ve got a year to figure out my next trick!

If you’re a writer, do you use critique partners? And if you’re a reader, what do you want to know about the process?