An Unexpected Benefit of Critique Groups

We humans aren’t good at seeing our own flaws, especially in our writing. When we look at something we wrote, we know exactly what we intended to say. So when we read the words back to ourselves—get this—it makes perfect sense to us! Our brain automatically fills in any gaps, ignores the hiccups, even glosses over the misspelled words, because it already knows what it expects to see. So our brain happily skips along, telling us everything is fine.

Thanks to our traitorous brains, that kind of self-editing doesn’t help us grow as writers. If anything, it reinforces bad habits and keeps us plateaued. So while self-editing is important, it’s not enough to elevate our skills. That’s where critique groups (or critique partners if you prefer a more one-on-one situation) can help.

The benefit to your story is obvious—other experienced eyes look at it and make suggestions to improve it. But improvement to that particular story is only half the value of belonging to a critique group. And it’s not even the most important half.

The most important benefit is this:

Critiquing other people’s writing will improve your own overall writing skills beyond anything you can do on your own.

This bears repeating. Critiquing will advance your own skills, not because those other writers critiqued your story, but because you critiqued theirs.

There’s a reason creative writing classes involve deconstructing the work of literary giants as well as critiquing each other’s work.

In the same way an auto mechanic learns the trade by taking apart car engines and reassembling them to see how they work, deconstructing someone else’s writing helps you see what makes their story work (or fail). You can identify strengths, weaknesses, word choices and their impacts, information gaps, settings, internal versus external goals, and so on. And like I pointed out earlier, it’s much easier to see those things in someone else’s work than in your own.

While you might not be aware that your protagonist is spending too much time muddling through his backstory without advancing the plot, chances are good you’ll be able to identify that same flaw in someone else’s story. Maybe you’ll see how the next writer does a bang-up job of using vibrant verbs and all five senses. Perhaps the third writer in your group is fabulous at realistic dialogue but relies too much on info dumps.

By carefully examining their writing and listening to other writers’ feedback on the same story, you’re giving yourself a personalized creative writing class. You’re learning what you can spot, but you’re also seeing what other writers notice. You can then apply what you just learned to your own work. “Hmm, Sue pointed out that Joe’s story had too much dialogue in his fight scene today, and she was right. It really made the scene drag. I wonder if I’m doing that in my scenes.”

The more you critique other writers’ work, the better you’ll get at critiquing. And the better you’ll get at writing. And the better each of your stories will be. It’s a lovely cascade of improvement that every writer, no matter what their experience level, needs.

It’s like the world’s cheapest college-level creative writing program. As Mary Oliver said in A Poetry Handbook:

“With everyone using an understandable language, and with a number of persons scrutinizing the work, the workshop members can learn a great deal about their general aptitude and specific writing skills—can learn much more than even the most diligent writer could ascertain in the same amount of time while working alone.”

This is why it’s so important to be an active participant in your critique group. I’ve seen a few critique group members only show up when they had a story they wanted everyone else to read. But they never showed up when it wasn’t their turn.

That’s selfish, because they’re depriving other members of thoughtful feedback on their stories. But it’s also short-sighted. They won’t learn anything about their overall writing. They may learn how to fix a specific problem in that single story, but they’ll leave the group at the same skill level where they began.

If you want to level up your writing chops, put 100% effort into reviewing other writers’ work and helping them improve. Your own stories will benefit from it.

For more on critique groups, check out these previous posts on the RMFW blog:

• Maggie Smith, “5 Guidelines for Writing a Helpful Critique.”
• Ann Gordon, “Writing Online Critique Group Guidelines.”
• And my own previous post: “A Writer’s Tribe: Critiquers, Alpha Readers, and Beta Readers, Oh My!”

[Photo by Alexis Brown on Unsplash]