Why Writers Should Be Critiquers

I’ve been part of a few critiquing sites over my writing career. I started in 7th grade on the Young Writers Society (YWS), a site which caters towards teen and young adult writers who want to get feedback on their writing. For me, posting on these sites helped me warm up to the idea of sharing my work with people I knew and sharing my passion more openly. Over the years, I’ve tried a number of sites, but I recently landed on Critique Circle (CC) which offers a very similar platform for adults.

The appeal of sites like these is that you need to review to get reviews. They create a virtual economy incentivizing contributors to pay it forward and ensuring that you will get feedback without having to search for people willing to take the time to sit down and read through your piece. This is especially helpful for writers, like 7th grade me ,who are too embarrassed to ask people they know to take a look at their work. Instead you just hit submit and wait for people to come to you.

Capitalism is great.

However, if you’ve spent enough time posting on one of these sites, or if you’ve been in an introductory creative writing class, you probably know that quantity isn’t necessarily quality. Whenever you contribute to critique (offline or especially online), you’re liable to find a number of people who aren’t as interested in giving quality feedback as they are in getting that feedback for themselves. YWS and CC encourage users to write longer critiques by offering more points, but that can’t really judge if the writer is taking the time to look of the piece once or twice and really think about what the author can do to improve. I’ve found that a majority of critiques I’ve gotten have been of the simple and quick “grammar and spelling” variety. Which isn’t really what I’m looking for in getting critiques for a first or second draft.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve gotten some really helpful critiques on these sites from writers who put the time and work into my piece. But I think it’s kind of a shame that some writers don’t take the practice more seriously.

Joining a critiquing forum was one of the greatest decisions I ever made for my writing. Even though the feedback I received wasn’t as helpful as I wanted it to be, the practice of giving critiques helped me improve my writing immensely. Looking at someone else’s work critically is a great way to train your eye for finding writing methods that don’t work and develop your tastes as a writer. It allows you to step away from your "perfect little draft" where nothing could be improved and think about how a reader would approach your writing.

Joining a critiquing forum was one of the greatest decisions I ever made for my writing.

Critique is great for learning about developmental editing as well. Anyone who’s tried to edit their second or third draft knows that it’s really hard to think about the complete picture of your own story. When you’re the writer everything is flux. You could rewrite the whole thing and change all the characters and the entire ending of the book if you thought you needed to. That kind of power is overwhelming. But when you sit down with a draft you have a set of parameters to work with. You only have what the writer wrote and what the writer has implied the ending will be. While it seems counterintuitive, that restriction can be incredibly useful for fostering new ideas. Instead of making big changes, you’re encouraged to make smaller ones which target the issues themselves instead of avoiding the problem altogether.

And this may because I’m an editor and have been polluted by the idea that writing theory is fun and interesting, but editing is kind of fun. I love finding something that doesn’t sound right and figuring out other ways it can be said and what those phrasings might imply about the characters and world. I love thinking about possible routes someone’s story can go. I love reading a piece that’s really, really, fantastically good and thinking about what it’s doing that I could bring into my own writing.

You can’t really be fully engaged in your writing without thinking about the craft of it. Critiquing is an effective tool for practicing problem solving and growing your taste as a writer. When you fully engage in the practice of critique, and attempt to empathize with other authors, it can make the writing life a lot less lonely. You can see writers struggling with the same never-ending process of improvement as you are, and you know you're not alone. It reminds you that every author has written a draft. That every draft was imperfect and every draft could be improved upon.

I really recommend writers find a critique group, specifically one with writers of a similar experience level. Reedsyblog has a list of sites to choose from if you want to shop around. Take your time. Read other people's critiques. Think of it not as free editing, but as a community of writers helping each other learn and become better.