During this phase of Writer In Motion, we sent our self-edited drafts to our two critique partners (CPs) for feedback. My CPs were J.M. Jinks and Thuy Nguyen, and boy was I lucky!

If you haven't guessed by now - based on my previous chapters - or if you've checked out The Perfect Story - my editing abilities primarily lie in Developmental Editing . This involves story structure analysis and making sure the story arc is working in each scene or overall. Basically, is the scene/story working, and if not, why?

Line-editing is a bit harder for me. I'm a big-picture person, so the detailed elements just take more energy. Thankfully, both Thuy and J.M. are fantastic at line/copy-editing!

Here's a look at my manuscript after their comments and suggestions:

Looks daunting...

I'll be honest, I was a little anxious about receiving their feedback and I think that's totally normal. We are attached to our work and it can be hard to take criticism.

However, constructive critique almost always makes a story so much better. And since I'm one of the founders of The_Bookshop which was created for the most grueling critique competition of all - The Gauntlet - I definitely better be able to handle it. Otherwise I'd have no business dishing it out to others.

It's ok not to agree with the critiques of others. Sometimes there are pieces of a manuscript which are really necessary in order to convey the voice, characterization, theme, or story arc, which a CP might not understand. It's ok to disagree then and keep your vision.

If you find, however, that multiple CPs are suggesting removing a certain part, or aren't understanding a specific area, that means there's a problem with your story/line/characterization in that area.

Great CPs will critique your work in a way that makes sure it keeps your voice and vision and HALLELUJAH! I agreed with almost everything mine said.

I'm going to point out a major element which Thuy called me out on - with good reason. The beginning and ending paragraphs which she shows as deleted above, while I loved them, and at first didn't want to remove them because they kind of held a quirky tone and were setting the voice for the story, were a bit unnecessary.

I knew this...

If you look closely in my analysis chapter you'll see a distinct absence of these paragraphs except in "set-up" or "resolution." While set-up and resolution are two necessary parts of a story, these were more nebulous and didn't directly interact with my main characters.

But I liked them...

So what's a writer to do?

Read the next chapter to see how I integrated them into the story.

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