Week two

[hildy89]

Well, despite sweating bullets over the assignment, the first homework assignment for my SF class went well. The second week is on creating characters. I'm desperately trying to get this done, so I can write my first piece to be critiqued. I'm hoping I can finish this homework early so I'll hear some feedback before I get too involved in this idea. The critique works in a two fold process, i.e. you give two good things and you give two things to improve on. I'm not nearly as detailed in my critiques as I could be.

Then again, I don't want the experience I had before when I participated in a romance novel group. I had a few chapters critiqued, received a lot of nice comments back. And then received this monstrous message. And I thought "Did she write that long a critique?" No, she rewrote my chapters herself with edits and occasional explanation. Sometimes she changed things and the meaning completely changed too! Her argument was that she did this for a living as a technical editor/writer and that it was just too bad if you couldn't take the criticisms.

Comments

Ugh, I know what you mean...

[jordannamorgan]

I gave up a long time ago on writers' or would-be writers' groups, because every single person I ever encountered in them was invariably nasty. Maybe I get less constructive input in my writing, but if I'd stayed around those people, I might have ended up running away from writing altogether.

Jordi