Friday, June 29, 2018

Critique group jumps very horny shark

On and off over the last several years, I'd been keeping my eye open for a local critique group. In my head, it was a handful of writers who met every month in a bar somewhere and spent a couple of hours sharing feedback on each others' works. We'd each credit the others in the Acknowledgement pages of our novels and move on to the next round of drafts (and draughts). But I never found the secret bulletin board where this group was posted, and it lived only inside my mind.

This past January, I discovered Meetup.com, which for perhaps apparent reasons I had previously dismissed out of hand as a site for finding discreet partners. Turns out it's nothing like Adult Friend Finder, and you can instead discover groups that knit, hike, and even critique each others' writing. However, there were no writers groups that met during non-working hours. So I started my own. Instead of a bar, I scheduled the first meeting in a coffee shop. Five other writers showed up, which surpassed my expectations, as I'd imagined the horrible awkwardness of sitting across the table from one other person, much like a "party" I hosted one night years ago.

We laid out some basic ground rules about how much was reasonable to expect each other to read each month (in the neighborhood of 10-12 pages, double spaced) and what was the best way to share our work (we settled eventually on emailing it around to the group). It was decided that the coffee shop was too loud for us to all hear each other easily, and we searched for a new home, eventually settling on a somewhat centrally located library with reservable rooms.

As the months progressed, we each got a feel for the others' writing styles, abilities, and preferences for feedback. Some didn't want to hear about punctuation and typos, others wanted everything from the missing commas to the lost plots. I learned which of my fellows' work was likely to make for a quick read, and which would need extra effort to work through, and adjusted my approach accordingly.

And then, this month, I hit something unexpected. And let me preface this by emphasizing I'm not a prudish member of the Moral Majority (which is more of an immoral group in my book, but that's by the by). Someone's character was asked their "how we met" story and delved much more deeply into it than I, or really 99.99999999 percent of earthlings would delve. They met, they drove to a first date, they proceeded to perform elaborate intimate acts for 3-4 pages (single spaced), and somewhere not long after I encountered the breasts like scoops of homemade vanilla ice cream with raisins for nipples, I started skimming. I still saw words like "vagina," "perineum," "penis," "orifice," and so many others I wasn't necessarily hoping to see. Again, not because I'm a prude, but more because, a) if I'm going to read something like that, I'd really rather not be able to picture the author's face who wrote it, and b) it had nothing to do with the rest of the story. It was like a movie with a sex scene thrown in, just for the hell of it. Only they've gone from PG-13 to NC-17 without so much as warning the audience.

The day of our meeting, I kept running through in my mind what I would say when my turn came to share my thoughts. On the one hand, I didn't want to blow anything out of proportion or embarrass anyone. On the other, I felt obligated, as founder of the group, to at least get a feel for the general appetite for such content. And then we met, and ... the author didn't show up. Which wasn't the first time for them. We spent nearly two hours going around the room sharing our thoughts on each others' work, and it came time to pack up and I cleared my throat and asked what everyone thought of the writing sample in question. Turned out only three of the six of us present had received it. The other two were in agreement with me that it was out of bounds. As were the ones who had not received it once they got a peek.

Then it was on me to craft an appropriate email to this author, which I did Wednesday night before heading up for bed. I tried to be sensitive and not make it personal, not knowing what kind of response it would generate. Here's what I came up with:


Author,

We never really laid down any rules regarding content for the group. I can't say it occurred to me that we needed them. However, the consensus tonight was that [character]'s how-we-met story was well over whatever line we would have set had we set one. I hope you can understand that extremely descriptive sex scenes are not what most of the group is looking to critique. Please keep this in mind for future submissions.

Thanks,
James

In my head, there were two possible replies. The first was "Screw you guys, I'll write what I want," which given the individual involved, seemed like the 60 in a 60/40 bet. The 40 side was an apologetic, "Gosh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize everyone else would take it like that." Turns out there was a third possible response. The non-response. Here we are 48-hours later, and I haven't heard anything at all. Maybe that says all that needs to be said. I suspect we won't be seeing any more vanilla ice cream tits. And I think I'm okay with that.

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