Great Critique

Tonight I got a chance to be one of the group facilitators (know-it-alls) at the local Society of Book Writers and Illustrators annual Great Critique. I had the opportunity to see the work of four writers who are working on young adult novels and looking for feedback, an invaluable thing to have no matter what your levels of experience and expertise are. I was impressed! The four samples I saw (and the novels they were excerpted from) were quite different from each other, but all of them showed promise. As is always the case, I learned as much as the people who had submitted work, just from the give and take of the session and the dynamics of having several points of view feeding and bouncing off each other. I hope the writers keep going with their stories, but I don’t have much doubt that they will.  I saw only five pages from each of them, but they all have completed substantially more, so there’s no reason to think they’ll get sidetracked at this point.

Write on!