I'm in an online writer's group and a face-to-face. Everybody in the face-to-face is competent. Not everybody in the online is. By FAR the hardest segments to critique are the incompetent ones.

My writing class involves an hour or so of small groups -- 3 or 4 women who are in the same group for the whole semester -- that are designed to give each woman a chunk of time to have a piece of writing critiqued.

Now, the way small group is structured, the writer specifies what kind of feedback she'd like -- some women don't want critique; they might be working with a first draft and not want real nit-picky punctuation critique; they might be reading a journal entry that they just want to share but don't intend to revise further; or, as is the case with one woman in my small group, they might be such a new writer that they're not ready to hear critique. And I totally respect that.

However -- this summer class is not my normal Thursday-night group, so all the women are new to me -- I ask for critique when I bring stuff to small group. I want feedback on my *writing.* And the women in my small group always, without fail, comment on the content, but not the actual writing.

I have class tonight, and I'm going to have to hit that really hard -- stress that I want to know what they think of the writing itself, and not just the topic.

Wow.It sounds like, to put it mildly, they are focusing on the wrong end. The whole "having the book in the store" bit instead of having some story they want to tell, you know? Kind of the opposite side of Anne Lamott's K-Fucked.(One station says you're not worthy, and the other side plans to hang out with David Letterman or someone.)ETA: Deb's critique-seekers not Tep's group. Tep, I had the same problem with the group I was in.

erika, I think part of this is the couple themselves. She spent years immersed in soaps, as a reporter for a Hollywood rag on the subject; he's a go-getter, runs a PR agency. They decided to write the thing, rented a cabin in the woods, spent three months doing nothing except writing the thing, and came out with (please, Jebus, help me) 135K words.

I don't want to paint them as arrogant or evil or stupid. I don't get that impression and besides, would they be asking for help so easily if they didn't think they needed it?

But non-arrogant, non-evil and non-stupid aside, I think they're clueless about what a novel is, and how to write one.

Oh, they went for the cabin in the woods thing, huh. What, is bullfight season over? No, I'm kidding. And also jealous.Sounds like reading more books would not come amiss(probably not for anybody, actually.)

At least they didn't go rent an attic in Paris.

Bwah. I think maybe my whole life's writing, including posts, might reach 135K, so I can understand their being excited by their productivity and thinking that meant they were really "hot".

See, the longest one I've written was Fire Queen at 93K, and I consider that an epic and thought it was too long, although there really wasn't anything extraneous. I think in smaller, more concise books.

I really, truly, do not understand how people work best in epic form. My take on it is always dude! This is three books! Get an editor, damnit!

I can also understand that people with experience in journalism and PR would assume they had writing skills enough between them to transfer to a novel. But I'm still boggling that they sent out so many queries--you'd think with their background they'd be more savvy about figuring out how these things are generally done.

Yeah, I don't think you get into that without wanting to write stuff.And Susan, just figured out your tag. I was thinking like 'dracula bat" duh.(smacks forehead0

I should probably get a new tag. (For posterity, current tag is "The ping of an aluminum bat is an abomination before Almighty God.") That one is from something my DH said when they kept advertising the College World Series on ESPN with lots of those high-pitched pings, but that was weeks ago now.