Tricky.

How about some extra formatting to help demarcate the threads?

etd irrelevant comment

What kind of formatting are you thinking of? What is unclear?

I made some changes. Is it more understandable now?

Maybe it's just me, but the slashes read like alternate word pairs instead of thread separators. How about:

She:
turned the corner by the bookstore.
walked down Reed to the train station.
stopped at the intersection and waited for the bus.

No, that looks like sequential actions instead of alternate paths. Maybe a font distinction too?

edited to play with fonts

I tried alternating regular with italic phrases. Does that set it off enough?

Maybe replace the slashes with something that isn't a punctuation mark that could logically go there -- something like :: or something.

Once I figured out what was going on, reading it made me shiver.

Think I'm going to go with alternating fonts and :: separators. I want everything on one line to give the effect of destinies flickering in and out of possibility. Things are fairly amorphous and not set in stone. It should look fairly confusing, because any one or a combination of destinies are happening at the same time. It's not necessarily a choice of one of three or one of two, it's all of them intertwined. Hard to do in print.

Those are great, dcp and Sail.

OK, I'm really having trouble understanding the no explanations school of critique groups, and I'm wondering if it's one of those "talk past each other" things. So I'm going to give two examples from my weekly group where I feel like getting to explain myself helped me get more valuable info from the process. Would this kind of explaining be allowed in your groups? And if not, how would a writer get this type of info?

1. In Ch. 2 of the wip, Anna talks to her cousin and his wife, her closest friends in the army, about her husband's death and her impending return home. Ch. 2 happens to be a big sloppy mess that I'm going to have to edit and refine eventually. I'm putting it off, telling myself that I need to let it rest, and that if I push forward with new work, I'll have a better idea how to edit it, because it's sort of a bridge section. But anyway. M in my writers group said that Anna needs to be warmer and more honest about her feelings. I had to fight the urge not to "yes, but," but rather to say, "You're absolutely wrong," because the whole point of Ch. 2 is that Anna is alienated and has built thick self-protective walls that even her closest friends can't get through.

So I tried to explain the story purpose and cultural reasons Anna wouldn't exactly bare her soul, and ask if there was a way to make her more sympathetic within that framework. I think M still wants Anna to tell everything to her cousin's wife (which is crazy because that would dilute the impact when she finally does open up to Jack in a few chapters), but J and A had some good ideas for how to work in more of what's going on behind Anna's correct facade, and how to avoid Buffy S6 issues in working with a depressed and traumatized lead character. But if I hadn't tried to explain what I was doing, I would've just gone home thinking, "M just doesn't get it." And I wouldn't have learned anything that'd help me strengthen my story.

2. Last night J wanted Jack to slip up and call Anna by her first name while they're having their "we screwed up and we'll never do it again" conversation the morning after their first kiss. Now, I've already planned when and how they're going to get to a first-name basis, and it's an important character point that Anna is the one who pushes for it. So I explained, said I had this lovely scene all planned for a few chapters down the road. So J said then I needed something else in last night's scene to signify the moment in the conversation where they stop interacting as Lady and Sergeant and slip into Woman and Man. Which was the huge "Aha!" moment--I already knew I was writing a story with a tangled, convoluted power dynamic between the protagonists, but I'd never spelled it out for myself quite that neatly and efficiently.

Which brings me back to the question of how you get to those moments if you can't talk back to your critique partners? Or is that type of talking back allowed in all groups, and y'all are talking about something else entirely.

dcp, I love your refrigerator vignette. And Sail, that was just macabre, and as Hil said, shivery. And I liked the earlier, prettier one better! Not that it *was* necessarily better, I just *liked* it better.

I so completely agree with the writer not explaining. "Now, before you read this--"

Are you going to go out into the world with this poem and tell every reader, "Now before you read this..." No? Then the poem/short story/memoir/opinion piece needs to stand on its own. Is it ready for critique, or do you want to bring it back next meeting?

There were three of five of us working on novels, and it got to be completely crazy, because one woman would bring copies of three chapters for us to take home and critique. We'd mark our copies and give them back to her, meantime she'd have re-edited the same three chapters and have those plus two new chapters next time. And this was just one person. I preferred to let people take and read the whole thing, mark it up as they wished, and give it back. If they wanted to discuss I was more than open to that, and I tried very hard to listen, to not attempt explanation, but to ask for clarification. But that was done one on one, separate from formal meetings. The third person would bring in random chapters, some she'd given us before but had rewritten... it was totally undisciplined madness.

We did much better with short forms that we could complete discussion and critique in one meeting.

But I'm not talking about "before you read this." I'm talking about trying to clarify what their reactions mean after they read something and comment on it, so I'll have a better idea of how to fix it so that the meaning I'm trying to convey actually makes it to the page.

Susan, my answer is, that's what I meant when I said I was (probably) a bit less draconian about it than Betsy was. For your first example, my own response would likely have been along the lines of "Ah - good point. But since you're talking about, well, the end of the book, I'm leaving it there." I don't think that's arguing, or yes-butting; if someone in my own group stresses a particular point that I already have plans for elsewhere in the book, I'll generally say so.

And for the second example, that, to me, sounds like a suggestion coming from someone who would, themselves, have written it that way. To me, that's a suggestion that gets a moment's weight and no more.

But your "aha" moment came out of the dialogue, and lord knows, we're all talky meat at my group. Just, if the writer whose work is on the table at the moment is getting overwhelmed, we move on.

At the other end of it, I'm with Bev 100% on the idea that a writer had better make it clear, since going out and knocking on readers' doors to explain things isn't an option.