Find Your Creative Partners
Desperately Seeking Good Art Friends
If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the wake of the Bad Art Friend scandal, it’s that no one in the writing community is safe from their peers. Even donating a kidney will not protect you. You must choose your art friends wisely, lest you be screenshotted, plagiarized, mocked mercilessly in the group chat, and gaslit in the New York Times.
It’s unlikely that your or my outcome of seeking art friends to to share our creative lives with will result in as much ruckus as this all has raised. Your secret Facebook posts will probably not be screenshotted for nefarious purposes, your group chats will most likely go unsubpoeanaed. But still, one wants to be careful.
When I interface with writers who are just hitting the point of their journey where they have complete drafts to work with, there’s usually some hesitation around what comes next. I’ve heard a lot of writers express concern that their idea will be stolen, or their work plagiarized, by the people they select as critique partners and beta readers. I’ve often said that while this certainly can happen that doesn’t mean it’s likely to happen and if someone does plagiarize your work, it’s not so hard to demonstrate that you had your manuscript first.
The truly rampant plagiarism is not the Dorland v Larson kind, in which a writer steals another writer’s material and then doubles, triples, quadruples down on being in the right to have done so. What’s much more common is that content is posted in a public forum like Wattpad or Royal Road and, if it proves popular, lifted wholesale by someone living outside US jurisdiction and sold for profit.
But that doesn’t eliminate the possibility of encountering a Sonya Larson out there in the literary world, someone who attends workshops with you and trades critiques and then deceives or defrauds you. To be fair, people posing as creative partners aren’t the only ones doing this. There are predatory agents and publishers as well looking to part naïve writers from their valuable intellectual property.
I hope I have convinced you to lock up your manuscript in a vault and never let anyone near it. My work here is done. The end.
Just kidding.
Nothing good comes out of a vacuum. Have you ever vacuumed a floor and then looked in the bag or canister? There’s nothing good in there. Writing is like that, too. If you write in a vacuum your work isn’t going to be its best. That’s been the topic of enough previous Shelf Lifes that I don’t need to rehash it here. Feedback and iteration are necessary for growth, that’s all.
Today I’ll cover where and how to find creative partners to work with on growing your writing skills and polishing your manuscripts for submission and publication. Can I guarantee that no one will make off with your manuscript in a bad art heist? Can I promise your search will yield only good art friends? I cannot. But I hope I can arm you with the information that will help you make wise choices.
The Paid and the Free
The first thing you need to decide is whether to pay cash money to someone to help you with your work or if you prefer a trade of like services. My heading is disingenuous. Critique is not really free even when it’s free.
When you hire an editor or a proofreader to help clean up your manuscript, that person is is a skilled professional who provides a service that you likely cannot provide back in trade, unless you are an editor or a proofreader yourself. These are not the types of services I’m talking about today. Today I’m talking about the people who work with you on developing yourself as a writer, which is done in part by sharing feedback on your manuscripts but not only via work on your manuscripts.
Most of these people, unless they are your close personal friends, will not do this for you for free. There’s an expectation that they’ll receive something of value in exchange for their time and effort. This could mean you enter into a partnership where you both provide critique and mutual support to one another (for example, a critique partner), or it could mean you hire someone to work with you on improving your work and developing your writing career (for example, a writing coach). Usually you would hire someone at a more advanced level of skill and experience than yourself or partner with someone at a similar level. Mentorships are also out there if you go looking for them, both paid and unpaid.
There’s not a correct choice here. Paid professionals don’t necessarily provide better support than peer partners. Conversely, electing to hire someone doesn’t mean you couldn’t hack it with your peers. Some writers have more time than money to devote to their development and some have more money than time. I will say that if you have never participated in peer critique of art, then there’s a lot of benefit for you in developing this skill. You’ll use it a lot if you become a professional writer.
Paid Partners
Writing Coaches
Writing coaches are incredible people. I know a few personally and have worked with a few on my own writing. A writing coach is always going to be someone you pay—this isn’t a service that’s offered in trade for writing coaching right back at them.
A writing coach does a lot of things: They evaluate your work and provide targeted feedback to help you improve; they help you build up your writing habit; they get you over creative hurdles; they impose deadlines to keep you generating content. Most important, they provide encouragement. Wherever you are in your writing journey, they can help you stay engaged and avoid giving up on your work.
Your relationship with your writing coach may be a bit like a relationship with a therapist or doctor. You will have to tell them things you’re afraid of sharing. They may tell you things that are hard to hear. You have to be able to trust them. When you go looking for a writing coach, make sure you consider not only the services they have on offer (these should be clearly delineated explanations of what you will get for your fee, and not just “coaching”) and the experience they bring to the table that makes them a valuable provider, but also your rapport with them. Choose someone you enjoy working with.
To find a great writing coach, don’t just Google “writing coach” and make a list of the top-level search results. Anyone can make a website and put whatever they want on it; prominence of search results only tell you someone is good at search-engine optimization and doesn’t tell you anything about their skill as a writing coach.
Writing coaches give workshops in addition to working one-on-one with clients, so a great place to start hunting for one is looking for writing workshops. You can find free and paid workshops (more on workshops in a second) and take a look at who is leading them. Attending one is a great way to get a feel for the person you’d be working with.
The Editorial Freelancers Association has members who provide literary coaching, so you can find writing coaches in their directory. They also offer a handy rate chart and other resources for authors.
Workshops
As I was saying: Workshops. Workshops are events you attend to work on your manuscript or on a particular aspect of craft with other writers doing the same, usually under the guidance or direction of a more experienced and successful writer or writing coach. Workshops usually feature small groups, are great for networking, and are more cost-effective than working with a professional one on one. I’ve attended writing workshops on things like battling writer’s block and improving dialogue writing and I’ve also participated in workshops where each writer brought a limited amount of text to receive feedback and criticism from the other participants.
Workshops often have a fee to attend but they’re cheaper than working one-on-one with a professional, as the cost of the facilitator is split among the paying participants. Thanks to COVID, many writing workshops that would have taken place in person a few years ago are now offered online so they’re easier than ever to find and you don’t have to be co-located to attend. I like Eventbrite for finding writing workshops, although that site does not specialize in writing events. You can find larger (but also more expensive) offerings from providers like Gotham Writers or through outlets like Poets & Writers.
Manuscript Critique Services
Critique services are exactly what it says on the tin: You provide your manuscript and, for a fee, receive a critique. This is fairly similar to hiring a professional for a manuscript evaluation or a manuscript appraisal, but there are some service providers who bill themselves specifically as providing critique or literary criticism of your manuscript.
What you’re looking for in anyone who provides manuscript critique for pay is their credentials: Where did they learn to critique manuscripts, and why should you trust them to be good at it? People who provide critiques of this nature are usually successful authors or editors themselves, so checking their credentials in that respect will give you a good idea. You can also consider their client list; have the people they’ve worked with gone on to what you would consider success?
You can find people offering manuscript critique on sites like Fiverr and Upwork, but I don’t recommend them for this as the screening you would have to do to find a skilled freelancer would be intense. Reedsy is a similar freelance marketplace but limited to editorial service providers, so you’d have better luck there. Another option, if you want to find a very high caliber of carefully vetted provider, as The Loft.
Free Associates
Critique Partners
A critique partner provides a similar service to a paid manuscript critiquer, but instead of paying them in dollars you exchange manuscripts with them and critique each other’s work. I have a couple of critique partners I work with and their help is invaluable. With a partnership like this, as opposed to a paid provider, you will want to look for someone who:
Enjoys reading the type of stuff you write and preferably writes similar content;
Writes a similar quantity of work as you and at a similar frequency, to keep things fair; and
Has goals similar to yours.
When I say keep things fair, I mean you don’t necessarily want to connect with someone who writers one short story a year if you are someone who writes one short story a month, or the partnership won’t be equitable. In terms of goals, be up front with what you want from a critique and make sure your partner is of a similar mind. If one of you wants to receive actionable criticism to grow the craft and one of you wants a pat on the back and to be told their work is great, then you won’t have a profitable partnership.
There’s no shortage of places to find a critique partner; there are Google Groups, Facebook Groups, internet forums, all of writing Twitter, and websites just for this purpose. My advice is to begin your search with some content in hand so you’ll be ready to swap right away.
Join or Start a Critique Group
Critique groups are like a combo of writing workshop and club: There’s a core group of people who share manuscripts with one another and share feedback regularly. A critique group might meet in person, or online via video conference, or just provide feedback asynchronously. These are really nice because the work of critiquing others is shared among the group, because you get multiple perspectives every time you share your work, and because more members means a more regular flow of work through the group (one hopes).
If you want to join an existing critique group, you can find them on Eventbrite as mentioned above or through Meetup, or by asking around among your social group to see if anyone knows of a critique group taking new members. If you do find one, do your best to make the organizer’s life easy, because:
Organizing and keeping a critique group alive is hard work. I have done it several times in my life and it’s never a walk in the park, no matter how dedicated and motivated people are. People miss meetings, get busy with other things and lose interest, groups hesitate to add new members and then die off when their core members drift away. Organizing your own critique group can be very rewarding, but it’s not for the socially faint of heart.
Online Critique Sites
Finally, there are a number of places around the internet that function as gigantic online critique groups: For instance, Critique Circle and Scribophile. These sites work on a credit system where you earn credit by providing critiques of others’ manuscripts and then spend your credits to get your own work critiqued. These sites have been around for a long time and developed methods to make sure members receive meaningful critiques on an equitable basis.
I’ve used these sites and found them helpful in a pinch. At the end of the day, I prefer more direct back-and-forth with a partner who is familiar with my work than a new critiquer each time—but there are benefits to having random critique partners as well. They notice new and different things and, while in my experience everyone has been respectful, they tend not to go easy on you to spare your feelings as there is no personal connection.
Whether you choose to seek out a partner, or build a group, or hire a professional, manuscript critique is an integral part of preparing for the publishing process. Maybe you’ll learn something big about your writing or something small, but either way you’ll get to practice hearing people give opinions about your writing. The more you practice this, like everything else, the better you get.
If you think this sounds like an awful lot of feedback and criticism—just wait till your manuscript is published.
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