: Re: What weight should be given to writers groups critiques? I joined a writers group that meets every three weeks. I submitted the first eighteen pages of my work and also sent the same file

@Mendez196

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Ironically, you are basically asking another writer's group by posting here!

In general, writing should be tight, and not repetitive. Using "unremarkable" four times in one paragraph might be warranted if the point is to use it for emphasis. But every place you can eliminate connective words like "that" or "the" you should; it makes the text easier to read, and cuts the word count, and that cuts pages, and that helps sell the novel or make room for better pages; if you have written 4300 "that"s, you have 21,500 characters of it, about 14 pages of just "that". Surely if you got rid of half of them, you can think of something better to do with the 7 pages saved.

About the only time you need a lot of identifiers is if you have a lot of people talking. In two-person alternating conversations, you only need to help the reader keep track of who is talking occasionally. Personally, I do NOT recommend using language quirks, to me they sound unnatural. I have heard some in real people, but when I do I find them irritating after some time; I don't want to write that into my novel. Nor do I want to write accents.

The thing that reading groups can give you is harsher criticism, which is both harder to give and harder to take. They can tell you, for example, "Here is where I quit reading." Or "This sounded completely unrealistic," or "This part does not seem in character," or "It makes no sense this person agrees to this plan so readily."

One thing regular people can be expert on is whether the decisions and statements made by your characters feel like they make sense. Failure to make sense to the readers is a big problem, it jerks them out of the immersion of reading in order to figure out what happened.

One cause of this is the author assuming they have implied enough for the reader to figure it out. That's bad writing; your job is to assist their imagination, not force them to use logic to figure out what you are saying.

The other thing you can take reliably from regular people is by asking them where they got bored with the story. Getting lost or getting bored are things you want to avoid like the plague. (Getting lost will quickly lead to getting bored.) The book is supposed to be entertainment, not homework and not a logic puzzle. They want to be led by the hand through the story, with descriptions and conflict (people dealing with problems) from beginning to end.

For all other style questions, they are just telling you how they like to write, and even if they are successful and published, it doesn't mean you need to write like them.

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