Critique? You've Got to Be Kidding!!!!!!

My afternoon at the Virginia Festival of the Book offered me two distinct seat-cushion-up-ass experiences. The first occurred at the Dancing with the Manuscripts workshop. This was the forum where published authors from the Moseley Writers would work with each participant to speed critique the first 250 words of their manuscripts. I brought along the first part of a memoir I’m writing about my struggles with infertility. I didn’t figure this out in time to email my work days before, so I brought my page to the door and turned it in. What could it hurt?

It wasn’t until the moderator began the session that I realized what I had done to myself. She started by explaining that she would read each sample of work aloud. The four writers on the panel would hold up green cards if they liked the writing and wanted to continue reading or a red card if it sucked. Those weren’t the moderator's words. They may has well have been because all I heard were red card and I translated everything else she said into SUCK! There were only about two hundred people in the workshop as well to add to the humiliation and naked flogging to which we writers had just subjected ourselves. The one positive beam out of the whole thing was that she would not be reading any names.

I quietly had a panic attack for the next hour while the moderator read each person’s work. Red cards, green cards, and comments flew as one by one each writer was anonymously vindicated or bitch slapped for his or her style. I learned enough about craft from listening to the comments to know that I would have earned myself a red card or two or (gasp!) four. If I had inhaled even the slightest bit of coal dust at that point I surely would have shat a diamond.

Lucky for me and my overwrought ego, my story was not selected for critique. By the end of the forum, I had conjured up enough nerve to ask for some feedback. I marched my relieved ass up front and stuck my manuscript under the nose of the first available commentator. My patient helper happened to be Fran Cannon Slayton, moderator of the children’s publishing session I just attended.

“You get to the point quickly,” she said when she was done reading. “I understand what it’s about right off the bat. I am, however, confused here.”

She pointed to the part I wrote about hormones.

“I get that it’s about you, but you’re making me think that you are a teenager or something with this `bubbling soup of hormones’ thing,” she said. “You also mention your parents and then some stepchildren. I’m assuming the kids are yours, but I’m not sure from here if they belong to you or your parents.”

Woah. I had a lot of work to do. I hadn’t thought about how confusing the whole thing was. I hadn’t taken the time to read this through any other eyes but my own. Oh, boy.

I walked out of the forum, breathless, but still intact. I had awhile to recover before the Agents’ Roundtable next. That workshop would be my second cushion-up-ass experience, which I’ll share in my next post.