Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Locked Lips Torture

Critique groups endorse a form of torture not mentioned in any Geneva Convention. In my two critique groups, we try to abide by that all-important rule: when your work is being critiqued, your lips are to be locked until everyone has spoken. Hard? Torture hard!

When the critiques begin, you twitch, fiddle with a pencil, or shift in your chair. If someone mentions a small flaw and you don't agree, your brain explodes. You long to cry out, "You didn't read carefully enough! I did explain that! See, it's right there!"

Harder still, is keeping your lips locked when a fellow writer doesn't "get it" and demonstrates total ignorance about a basic premise of your manuscript!

I witnessed two writers accomplish this feat of self-control during the last month. They listened SILENTLY to a few clueless critiques (mine included) that missed an essential point of their manuscript. Kudos to both! One had written a picture book that experimented with the age of the main character. The other is writing a novel blending reality with exaggeration and magic.

Now comes the happy part: post torture, both authors were rewarded. The excellent group discussions following the critiques provided them with helpful fodder for revisions.

Moral of the story? If you belong to a good critique group, suffering through locked lips torture sometimes pays off.

9 comments:

  1. When I first read the title of your post, LOCKED LIPS TORTURE, I expected a steamy YA scene.

    Seriously, though...keeping quiet through a critique is torture, but if a writer is able to do it, the payoffs can be great.

    Remind me of this when the group critiques my proposals on Friday!

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  2. Thankfully, the rest of the group can't hear what the locked lipster is thinking while she's being critiqued!

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  3. We have been a little loose with our usual zip-the-lip rule lately. It's funny because we have a new member who has come to check us out and before we began we told her how we critique: sandwich method and locked lips. And directly after that, someone began a critique with a negative statement and the author responded. Do as we say, not as we do! LOL!

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  4. Yes, we all know the locked lips rule is hard to follow sometimes!

    Perhaps if that critique had begun with a positive thought, rather than a negative one, the author's lips could have remained locked (at least for a while).

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  5. The sandwich method has spilled over into the rest of my life. My 14-year-old always asks me if I'm doing the sandwich method whenever he senses a "but" on the horizon. No locked lips for him.

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  6. The sandwich method means starting your critique with a positive comment, then launching into what could be improved, and ending with another positive.

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  7. I've never heard it called the sandwich method.

    I just think it's polite.

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