Critical Friendships

As I finish my first unit of my Masters, I have been thinking about the benefits of critical friends. And then the pros and cons of internet groups compared to face-to-face groups, for many of us this is going to come down to how as individuals we interact better with different groups.

Online critical friendships can be great in that you can take longer to look over comments and suggestions before you need to react. You can even go over them several times. Your work or the work you are reading/critiquing is written clearly in front of you and you can read over it several times to be sure that you have gleaned the importance and meaning of every word. But your critics are in some ways an unknown at the other end of a line somewhere. You can’t see their reaction, their initial response to your words. It takes time to get responses and queries answered.

I have found that I need to be sure that my critical friends are real people. In one of the first meetings I attended with my current group, my writerly friend had a short story that he wondered if it would elicit a particular response, but was not going to tell me what he hoped that response was. So he read and I patiently listened, allowing the words to wash over me and as he finished I reached for a tissue to dry my eyes.

‘What sort of response do you want?’ I blubbed.

‘That one is fine.’

It was a very moving story, and it gave him more to see my initial response to hearing it than he would have got if I had emailed with my response. I did read it again after some small edits, and it was emailed through, and I sobbed out loud at my desk. It’s ok, my work colleagues already think I’m nuts. But I could email back that it worked well, same response.

It is more direct to be sitting with a group of people. I find it more helpful to be able to ask immediately if something works or not, to ask how to improve it, such as ‘What if…if she did this…or that?’

Each group is different too and different ways work for different people. My current group like to read out their work for comment. I have belonged to other groups where we had copies of what was being read so that we could follow along, or it was emailed out ahead of time and we could just work through comments during the group time.

If you have the chance to join a critical friendship, think about what might work best for you and don’t be afraid to try something different. I prefer the face-to-face interaction but I’m learning the benefits of online friendships too.

Happy Scribbling.