I’m in a quandary.

My Critique Group skews a bit older. Five tough birds and me. If you crack open Powell’s Catalog of Ornithology, you’ll find my picture next to the description of the Great Midwestern Snark. I’m not an easy critter either.

The unwritten rule of a manuscript critique is that you begin and end it by saying something positive. This group? Fuck that.  Fuck your niceties. Kiss my slapjack, Mr. Courtesy.

It’s more Fight Club than Crit Group.

And that’s… okay. You can beat the shit out of my manuscript. Two-thirds of the time it’s good advice. Tough love. The other third of the time it’s someone who is critiquing the pages they wished I had written instead of the pages I actually wrote.

My longstanding advice to writers being critiqued: “God gave you a middle finger for a reason.” Stand your ground if you are certain of your path.

And, frankly, a few of the most vicious critiquers are not exactly careful readers. They read at the last minute, sometimes finishing minutes before group is called to order. POV shifts they flag aren’t really POV shifts. Some passive voice they circle is in fact a time shift to past-perfect.  There is more than one flavor of Limited Omniscient. Three consecutive sentences of non-dialog narration isn’t necessarily an “info dump.” Yes, you can use an occasional adverb in a dialog tag if it’s essential to context. Okay. Fine. You soon learn who is reading carefully and who isn’t.

If you insist on walking through the daisies and looking for dog shit, I won’t stop you. Par for the coarseness.

Last time, though, it really felt as though a line was crossed. It got personal. My pages weren’t that bad. Bad, yes, but not that bad.

I’m partly responsible for this. In my day job as a Tech Writer, I must employ a lot of passive voice. No. Really. I have to. I take it out. A lawyer puts it back in. Lawyers live and die by passive voice. Passive voice is a corporate lawyer’s best friend.

XYZ Corp does not do things

Things are done at XYZ Corp. Sigh. Okay.

When you tell me I have a lot of passive voice in my fiction writing, the hairs on my neck bristle. I do not. I absolutely do not have passive voice in my fiction. No fucking way.

Whoopsie. I sure did.  A lot. Lordamighty. Stripping the passive voice out of a 400 page novel took two full working days.  And now:

Yay!

Thanks Crit Group!

But then… Then there is the “how dare you not take my opinion as anything other than law?” faction of the group.  Oy.

I can take the ass-whuppin. Really. But when it crosses the line into wolf-packing… Gah. What I can’t do is walk away from a crit group feeling as though I never want to write again. I simply can’t afford to feel that way. So I’m hemming and hawing. Not sure if this is really a healthy, productive environment for me. We missed a month because of scheduling conflicts, so I’ve had an exceptionally long time to mull over it. Do I really want to go back?

The answer seemed to be to just keep my pages out of the fray until my blood pressure returned. Give better critiques than I got. Give back more than I took. Read more carefully than I was read. Give resentment a holiday. Be nice.

We have one designated Nice Guy in the group. Heck. Why not two? I can do that.

Then the most vicious of the critiquers finally submitted pages. This was my opportunity to show more grace than I received. It was a chance to inject humanity into the process. Show some class, Shawn.

Jesus Aych. Some of the worst pages I’ve ever workshopped. I seriously wondered if I was being Punk’d.  Is this a SCUD missile? Sent to light up the radar on my AAA and give away my position through over-reaction?

Dunno.

I started writing this post to justify why I’m not going back to Crit Group. I hear myself whining like a bitch and now I’m not so sure.

Several years ago, after the folly of serving as Critique Group Coordinator for the St. Louis Writers Guild, I put together a little pamphlet called The Critique Group Manifesto.  It was a great idea, poorly executed. There is little-to-zero collective wisdom on critique groups out there.  Frankly, my writing about critique groups could have benefited from a good critique group.

Perhaps the time has come to revisit that dusty tract. Cold edit. Keep the knowledge and strip out the metaphoric masturbations.

Hmmm. But the big money question… Would I workshop it with this group?