I figured this would happen eventually, but not THIS soon. I should know myself well enough by now (I’m old) that I wouldn’t go out and join groups. Groups are difficult to deal with. People are so temperamental and develop all kinds of expectations. I’m much better one-on-one.
I enjoyed the critique group that I was in up until yesterday, but at the end of the meeting, the organizer aired the grievances that she’d been storing up for (apparently) several weeks now, and when I realized that her problems were mainly with me and my way of working, I left the group. No hard feelings. The only thing that I feel crappy about is that I won’t get to continue exchanging thoughts with the fellow who’s the songwriter and with the new person in the group; I felt that we had somewhat of a workable connection. But when I e-mailed them to say that I’d be thrilled to continue working with them online or elsewhere, I got silence, so that’s that. So it goes. So be it. Poo-tee-weet?
The reason I left was NOT because I didn’t want to “follow the rules” that I was being accused of having bent, BTW. It was because I think the tactics used (see below) were ridiculous game-playing, and I knew that I couldn’t promise to “always be perfect and more like you” from now on, so I couldn’t see any better solution. Once I left, if the only problems were those listed, their problems were solved. And I think that’s the logical answer.
However, I did accept the invitation I got by phone to be on a panel at the Writers’ League of Texas Dallas Chapter meeting next weekend. It’s going to be all about critique groups: how to get ’em, how to keep ’em. Or something like that. I now have yet another bad example to tell people about.
Or maybe I am the bad example. But I know how to help people set up groups, so that’s probably what I’ll talk about.
Here’s some advice for those of you who either work in groups (of any kind, not just critique circles) or have some group activity that you participate in.
If you get upset with another group member, the first thing you should do is take this up privately with that group member. You can e-mail that person or call on the phone, or whatever. Good managers know this. Find out why they’re doing X, or if they even realize they’re doing X, or if they actually ARE doing X, before you drive your blood pressure up. If instead you decide to air your grievances during a group meeting, even if you try to cloak it in “the group is doing this” and “some people are getting away with that,” it’s going to make things worse. People do not tolerate being chewed out in front of the group, at least not once they develop a bit of self-respect, and they frankly don’t have to take it. I used to have to sit through bullcrap and innuendo like that when I had a Real Job . . . but now I don’t.
Furthermore: Don’t sit there and stew and sulk for weeks because you don’t like something that you think another group member did or is doing, and work yourself up to an entire book of Green Stamps (to borrow some terminology from Transactional Analysis–actually, I think they make a distinction between green and brown stamps), and get all self-righteous, and be moody at about three or four meetings without giving any clue . . . and then at the fourth meeting, as it’s ending, burst out with a list of grievances that “the group” is doing, making the list include only those specific things that you are accusing that one other member of doing.
Because it’s silly. Why not just stand up at the first meeting during which you feel you’re being slighted, and say, “I only read and commented on the first 12 pages of your chapter because we agreed that we’d submit about 12 pages per meeting, and I don’t have time to read more”? That makes more sense. If others read more than the assigned pages (especially if those pages don’t garner much by way of commentary in the first place), then that’s THEIR issue, isn’t it? If other members chime in that their solid limit is ten pages, or whatever, then that’s fine. But if someone else reads further and it doesn’t appear to bother them, what does that matter, really?* If another member arranges to get a private crit of three chapters from another member, and the two wait until the meeting’s ended in order to take that up, then why can’t the rest of the members go ahead and take off? What’s it to them? This is the part I never get.
More to the point, if your days are so tightly scheduled that you can only allow one hour to do the entire critique group experience twice a month . . . I have some other observations to make.
If you are concerned that group members are not “getting equal time,” then you will HAVE to resort to using an egg timer/stopwatch/kitchen timer to keep track of exactly how long people have talked about a particular piece. Some submissions won’t get much comment, while others may have a major plot hole, and the author will receive lots of ideas and brainstorming. This means that different subs will naturally end up getting different amounts of time spent on them. Occasionally a twenty-pager will be pretty polished and not need much said about it, while a ten-pager has several spots where the author has done hand-waving instead of figuring out how the heroine can escape the clutches of the wicked landlord in some logical and believable way. In general, this stuff will balance out. If it doesn’t, then you aren’t producing enough pages–get to work so they’ll have to critique stacks of your pages. Or you’ll have to throw the floor open for questions/answers if a member still has sand left in the hourglass once everyone has talked about that member’s work. If you need that kind of perfection.
And you should mention this the FIRST time that you experience it instead of stewing and brooding over it until you blow up.
Worried about the time your group is spending? Okay, so you have a life and/or a job. You want to spend only one lunch hour a month on this thing, and you’ve limited the group size. What else?
First, don’t turn the group into a “I sit here and read off all the stuff that I wrote in the margins of your piece and then explain what I wrote and try to get you to respond” group. You could just as well go around the circle and ask people to give a quick summary of what they’ve noticed, and then let ’em say, “I wrote down my line edits and comments. E-mail me if you have questions, or get with me later.” That would mean that the circuit would take around five to ten minutes per participant. That was the way I thought my latest group was going to work, but when everyone else took the tactic of reading all the stuff off page by page, it made me feel as if THEY felt I wasn’t giving them enough . . . in other words, I had marked up punctuation and other suggestions on the page, but I wasn’t reading it aloud, and so that made it seem that I had given short shrift to the consideration. So I figured, hey, it’s going to be more of a social group. I started doin’ it their way. This was apparently a major irritant for Someone.
To be fair, one group member (that songwriter) generally leads off his critiques with his overall impression and with the issues he thinks you need to address. He talks about structure and character arc. I was delighted to discover that the new group member (at her second meeting yesterday) also addresses structure. She had been tossed into the fifth chapter or so of the Jacquidon mystery and had some reasonable concerns about why my murder takes place offstage. These are the kinds of questions that I think a group is really about, not the “I didn’t get this line” and “What’s this word mean” and “I hate the name Drynx’nyrd” kinds of questions. Unfortunately, I won’t get to pursue that any further with them.
(I think that groups who exchange crits by e-mail fare FAR better. There’s never a face-to-face moment, and therefore, if I say that I have come to the conclusion that the last three chapters you’ve submitted have not moved forward in the story spine but have been rocks that you threw at the character to create false complications that have nothing to do with your main story . . . then you get to jump up from the computer, throw things, rant and yell, and *then* decide that you’ll think about it a while before responding with, “Can you elaborate?” by e-mail. Also, all the critting is done during whatever part of the day the writers wanna do it, so night owls do it at night, while daytime people do it during the sunnytime. There’s never a problem with evening meetings, scheduling, lunch meetings, and what-have-you. The only reason I ever go to in-person groups, frankly, is because I’m so isolated and I need some social contact now and then. I always find the discussion stimulating. That’s why I don’t moan that “we’re running over time.” But then it’s made clear up front that I don’t have anything else planned for that particular afternoon, and it’s nice to be out of the house for a while.)
Also, if it bugs you THAT much when people are occasionally late, up to 15 minutes or so, then you should be in a group of people other than writers/creative types. Just start without whoever’s not there. They can catch up. This isn’t work. If somebody’s always late and holding up the group by more than fifteen to twenty minutes, then that person should perhaps leave the group. And that person is probably perfectly happy to do so, knowing that she isn’t doing it on purpose, she wasn’t THAT late, and she won’t be able to change the life circumstances that always screw with her schedule . . . so just ask.
I personally am congenitally late. Things just happen to delay me, no matter how early I start getting dressed. I’m almost never less than five minutes late to things unless I start out really early. I can sometimes be ten minutes late simply because I spent time driving around the parking lot, running to the bathroom, or stopping to give somebody directions because they were lost and collared me at the front door to the meeting place. However, I tell people up front that I may be late now and then, and if it’s not a social event and others will have to sit around waiting for me, I usually don’t sign up for whatever it is.
Yep, it would be nice if I didn’t have this problem. But I’m sure you know at least one other person who is like this, always has been, and doesn’t seem to be able to “correct” it (assuming that the dominant culture is right and you should NEVER be late EVER.)
I am who I am. I’m [blankety-blank] years old, and I’ve tried to change all my life in order to be more like what others want and expect . . . and it hasn’t worked. So at last, I have accepted myself as I am.
I have flaws. [Horrors!] I have strengths as well (although these strengths certainly don’t necessarily offset or excuse my weaknesses), and I play to those strengths. One of my strengths is being able to argue either side of most questions. Another is that I can tolerate weirdness and diversity in others (for instance, if you have a deadly fear of sidewalks, I will happily pick my way across the wet grass with you, even if it means my suede boots get baptized a little. What’s the harm? If you don’t ride elevators, we’ll take the stairs. It’s better for your health.)
I do NOT have the strength of keeping track of time . . . when I’m trying to leave, there’s always some sudden crisis, or Mama panics and says she can’t breathe (and ends up coming along), or someone comes to the door and can’t be put off . . . it’s a curse.
I also am not one to interrupt people or use a stopwatch to try to limit their critique time if they’re on a roll talking about theme and so forth, and so if someone wants a moderator who’ll always do that, I would suggest that *that* person always be the moderator so it’s always done right. I have found over the years that there are different types of people, and that it isn’t effective to expect X out of a Y person. I should know better by now than to join groups, as most groups do run in the “X” mode, and I run in the “Y” mode (and only shift into “X” with difficulty.) That is my flaw, not the fault of the groups, which must run under rules. (Generally, in large groups or in classes, the organized ones run things and those who are INTPs like me just tag along under the radar, so it doesn’t bother the organized ones. It’s in small groups where this stuff happens.)
Oh, and one final thing. If you are going to e-mail someone and you don’t really want to apologize but you feel that you have to pass something off as an apology because it’s expected, here’s a great line: “Fredette, you got your feelings hurt today and I am sorry for my part in it. You knew what the guidelines were and you said on your way out that you couldn’t follow them.”** Why, gosh, it’s a real expression of regret!
I think that’s about as passive-aggressive as it gets. “I accept no responsibility for your getting your feelings hurt by what I said, and it’s YOUR problem.” What ever happened to just saying that you’re sorry, IF you ARE, or saying that you regret what happened? I suppose that fell by the wayside way back when, along with virginity through junior high years and the iceman coming to stick a chunk of ice in your icebox.
But so it goes. I think I have a lot to add to the discussion of critique and the how-and-why. I’m looking forward to seeing what others say.
* That’s another thing. Let’s say you have a typical book, around 300 pages. And you join a critique group that meets twice a month or so and does only 12 pages each time. It’s going to take the group (300/12=25) twenty-five meetings to get through that book so that you can do your revision. That’s a little over a year! You can improve this throughput if you do a chapter per meeting, assuming your chapters are around 25 pages. If you only have five people in your group, that’s 100 pages every two weeks for you to read and meditate upon (you don’t have to do your own pages, so 4*25, if you’re balking at the arithmetic.) I think that improves your throughput greatly. (300/25=12, and I didn’t even have to do any arithmetic!) You’ll get through that in six months, which is about the same amount of time that some of us let a first/second draft lie before going back to get it submission-ready. I think this is more workable. I used to be in an SF/F crit group that did 25-30 pages at a time for each of us, and we photocopied the subs and handed them out at meetings to be brought back the next time (this wasn’t cheap back then!) One member dropped out, so the writer who hosted us at her house started running two of her books through the group. Somebody protested that she was taking advantage, but I didn’t mind, because I liked both of her books and she’s my old college roomie, so, y’know. But there was a bit of friction over that. She finally smoothed it over by taking everyone to the pizza parlor after meetings.
**Not exactly accurate. My feelings really weren’t hurt–but my sense of how things should work was. On my way out, I mentioned that if the guidelines were so rigid, I couldn’t promise that I would never violate one again, accidentally or inadvertently, and that the best way to make sure that everything ran smoothly would be for me to leave and create an opening for someone who *does* work their way. I also felt that the direct approach would have worked MUCH better. However, people hear what they want to hear. Including me–and I don’t want to hear any more about it. *grin* La, la, la.
* * *
“It’s more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction.” –Ex.-Rep. Mark Foley, in 1998, on Bill Clinton (via Old Horsetail Snake)
* * *
“I’m not, like, that smart.” –Paris Hilton (ditto)
* * *
I delete your consensus reality and subsitute my own, better reality!
shalanna 