Writing – Page 30 – Jeff Coleman Writes

My Critique Group is Awesome (or, “Why Critique Groups are Crucial for Success”)

By Jeff Coleman / August 4, 2014 December 9, 2016 / Art, Creativity, Personal, Writing

2 Comments

I’ve been meeting with a critique group for a little over a year.

At first, I was petrified by the idea of making myself so vulnerable. What if they didn’t like me? What if they didn’t like my work? I knew I had to break out of my shell, that I had to start meeting other writers if I was ever going to improve my craft and get to a point where I could publish my work. But I was terrified of rejection, and a few months passed before I finally found the courage to join a group and put myself out there.

It was the best decision I ever made.

I met some amazing writers and I learned a lot, not just about my fiction but also about the industry. One of my projects, a middle grade fantasy whose first draft is now in the hands of an editor, suffered from serious flaws that would have rendered it unpublishable. In just a few months, my group identified most of these problems and was there for me when I needed help figuring out how to fix them.

We gather around a table once a week and share up to ten pages of our work.

A volunteer reads each story out loud so that the writer has an opportunity to experience his or her words in a different way. When the reading is done, we go around the circle to discuss what we thought the writer did well and what we thought the writer could improve.

They help me identify and eliminate inconsistencies and contradictions. They help me resolve difficult plot and character problems that I’m either too inexperienced or too frustrated to solve. They recognize what I do well, but are also blunt and honest, and are never afraid to (charitably) point out the numerous ways in which I fail.

Sometimes I agree with their assessments and sometimes I don’t; art is inherently subjective.

But I always take what they have to say seriously and value their feedback. Knowing how my group receives my work gives me a better idea of how my audience will receive my work when it’s published. If the majority have issues with what I’ve written, I know I need to go back and take a closer look.

They rein me in when I get carried away. They encourage me to be bold. We support each other, inspire each other, teach each other, help each other to grow.

As an author, I’ve learned more in the year I’ve been with them than in all the other years I’ve been writing on my own.

If you’re an artist of any stripe, I implore you to get together with others in your field. You’ll find support. You’ll find insight. Most importantly, you’ll make fantastic friends and you’ll become better, not just as an artist but as a human being.

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©2014 Jeff Coleman. All rights reserved. For reproduction rights, please contact the author (who happens to be a kind and eminently reasonable man.) Unless otherwise stated, images are copyrighted by various artists and licensed by Shutterstock.

How to Create a World

By Jeff Coleman / July 28, 2014 December 9, 2016 / Art, Creativity, Fiction, Writing

You start with nothing.

You’re sitting alone in the dark, thinking. Then out of nowhere comes a blinding flash of interior light, a searing white-hot fire that consumes thought and vision.

You have an idea.

Everything your world is and everything it will become is locked up inside of it, an infinitely hot, infinitely dense point of creative energy waiting to be released. There’s a crack of mental thunder. A flash of lightning. For one brief instant, an entire universe that has yet to exist is laid bare before you, and you scramble to remember as much of the prophetic vision as you can before the flash winks out and the future goes dark. It’s a foretelling, a far-off plea from the denizens of your future world, crying out for you to grant them what only you can provide: existence.

You scratch your head. A little while later, you bang your head against a wall. What do you do with your idea? You’ve just seen an entire cosmos in the span of a heartbeat. Your chest begins to ache with creative agony, and you realize that you won’t be able to rest again until you’ve heeded its lofty call.

You have a mission.

You didn’t ask for it, and you have no idea how you’re going to fulfill it. But you ponder the people of your world and their desire for life. You reflect on your responsibility as a storyteller and you realize you have no choice but to buckle down and get to work.

You’re not really sure where to start. Your new world is a big place. You scramble to remember everything. You obsess over every detail. You worry that even marginal deviations will irreparably alter the fates of millions of fictional lives, or worse, that your world will destabilize and collapse, crushed by the combined weight of inconsistencies, ambiguities and indecision.

You learn that perfection is impossible.

You aim for it anyway, not because the ideal can actually be reached but because trying will propel you further than you ever thought you could go. You shoot for perfection; you embrace imperfection.

Wielding paper and pen, you lay the foundation of your world, one word at a time, a cosmic web spun from the fibers of your imagination. Sometimes, you look back and cringe at what you’ve constructed. But you know you can’t stop, that you have to press on, that you can’t rest until your world has at last crossed over the threshold into reality.

You continue to put one word after the other.

You work feverishly for days, weeks, months, years. The process is often painful. An entire world is erupting, a volcanic blast of newly formed material, coalescing from the ether of your mind.

You catch glimpses of your initial vision in the fallout, but you realize that your world has assumed a life of its own, that it’s destiny is only partially determined by what you’d forseen so long ago. You discover the truth, that the prophecy was not a vision of what must be but what could be, a glimpse into one of an infinite number of possible worlds. You realize that your universe and the people in it are substantially more complex, versatile and adaptable to change than you ever could have imagined.

When you least expect it, you look back and discover that you’ve finished.

One day, without ever having realized how close you were, you set the final word down in ink, the lifeblood of creation. You blink down at the final page with disbelief. Surely, you must have forgotten something. You go back to the beginning. You review your work. You go back to the beginning and review your work again. Eventually you realize that yes, you’ve done it after all, and just like that your world is alive.

You gaze at it with wonder, a product as much of divine mandate as it is of your imagination, and like an Old Testament god enamored with creation, you can finally look upon your newly minted world and proclaim, “it is good.”

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