A Community of Writers

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  It is my great pleasure today to bring you my friend Gigi Sherrell Norwood. She is my multi-talented neighbor, my long-time writing buddy, and she has a terrific new novelette out this week, DEEP ELLUM BLUES.

 

 

If I have encouraged (enabled!) her to buy cars and houses, she's set me on the road to addiction to fountain pens, journals, pottery, and quilts. I call it a fair trade. And she's always there for a cup of tea, a chat, a story critique, or a bit of baking. I call that priceless.

GIGI SHERRELL NORWOOD: What would I ever have done without the members of my writing community? I get up every morning to savor my tea as I read Jungle Red Writers. I call my panel of experts with questions about medicine, police procedure, and sports. I turn to them for encouragement, or a swift kick in the pants whenever I need it. It seems like every day I learn something new and interesting from at least one of them.

 They are my beta readers, when I need to know if a new story has succeeded or failed.

They are my street team when I release a new story, as I did on Wednesday with my latest e-read novelette, Deep Ellum Blues.

They are my tribe. They understand me. Even if they don’t like the genre I’m writing in, they know what I’m going through as I struggle to bring a new story into the world.

Most importantly, they are my critique partners—those trusted friends I know I can turn to when I need good, sound advice about my writing, or my life.

 

(Gigi and Debs, dates for a gala.)

My critique partners—particularly Jungle Red Writers’ own Deborah Crombie—have been there with support at many critical turning points in my life. Picture these actual scenarios, and see if you can draw some critique partner wisdom and encouragement from them, too.

Writer: I’m thinking about reviving a novel I wrote 15 years ago. Things have changed so much. It probably won’t work. I dunno . . .

Critique Partner: I always loved that story. I’m glad you came back to it.

 

Writer: It’s crap! It’s all crap! It’s the crappiest book I’ve ever wasted paper and toner on. I know this to my bones. Will you please read it?

Critique partner: (15 minutes later, after reading it) It’s not crap.

 

Writer: I just finished my chapter. Do you want to read it?

Critique Partner: (15 minutes later, after reading it) You bitch! How could you leave me hanging like that? Where’s the next chapter? And, by the way, great hook!

 

Writer: I need help brainstorming my new story.

Critique Partner: I have wine.

 

(Gigi and Debs' joint effort Christmas trifle.)

A good critique partner can be equally helpful when the writer is facing a life crisis of the non-writing variety. Take these actual situations, for instance:

 

Writer: I need to drive 500 miles north on yet another frustrating quest to settle an elderly family member’s estate.

Critique Partner: Road Trip! I call shotgun!

 

Writer: Where will I go? What will I do? I can’t live in this god-forsaken backwater any longer!

Critique Partner: Come spend the weekend with me. You might like my town. (And she did.)

 

Writer: Where will I go? What will I do? I can’t go back home for the holidays this year!

Critique Partner: Come have holiday dinner with us! Bring pie. And tequila.

(Gigi's pie for Debs' Thanksgiving.)
 

Writer: I HATE my car! It doesn’t even fit me.

Critique Partner: Oh, go on. Try the Mustang GT. What can it hurt?

(NOTE: The Writer has now paid off her second Mustang GT.)

 Writer: Oh, my God, I’m such a neurotic mess! I’ll never find a house, and everybody will hate me for whining so much about it.

Critique Partner: Yes, I know you’re a neurotic mess, but I love you anyway.

 

Probably my favorite example of my critique partners coming through for me in a crisis happened on my 18^th wedding anniversary. It was the first wedding anniversary I faced without my husband, who had died eight months earlier. Anniversaries are hard on me—particularly those private ones that don’t mean much to anyone else, but were deeply meaningful to Warren and me. Without Warren, our wedding anniversary kicked me into a deep depression. The only reason I brushed my hair and crawled out of the house that day was to meet with my critique group. They didn’t know the day was significant to me until they asked me how I was doing, at which point I burst into tears and explained my situation. These are the responses I got:

Critique Partner 1: It will be okay.

Critique Partner 2: You’re strong.

Critique Partner 3: We all miss him.

Critique Partner 4: You’re taking notes, aren’t you, so you can use this in some future novel?

 

I loved them all, but Critique Partner 4 really saved the day, because she made me laugh for the first time in ages. I laughed because she was right. In some part of my brain, I was taking notes, even though I still haven’t written that novel yet.

If any of these situations sound familiar, tell your critique partner how much you cherish him or her. And tell us your own fun, funny, wonderful critique partner stories!

 

Gigi with Gift, her kitten adopted after last year's Bouchercon.

Gigi Norwood was more or less doomed to a life as an arts professional. Her mother was an art teacher and her father taught drafting and design. She was listening to classical music in the
womb, and spent her summer vacations roaming art museums the way other kids went to Disneyland. She took her first stab at storytelling when she was four, and turned pro when she was twenty-six. Since then she has written political speeches, press releases, brochure copy, radio commercials, and feature stories for a major regional newspaper. After a stint in corporate healthcare, she fled home to the arts. She is currently the Director of Concert Operations for the Dallas Winds. Her first published fiction, Deep Ellum Pawn, was released in 2019. The sequel, Deep Ellum Blues, was released this week. 

More about DEEP ELLUM BLUES: 

"People have the right to make their own hideous, life-altering mistakes.”

 As the genius loci of Deep Ellum, Ms. Eddy Weeks is a hands-off goddess who won’t micro-manage human affairs.  She’d rather sit on the sidelines and enjoy the show.

 But a young blues musician named Mudcat Randall is flirting with disaster.  Eddy’s old adversary wants Mudcat to sign a tempting management contract.  Eddy knows there are deadly strings attached.  Can she afford to stand back when a third force enters the fray, and everything Mudcat has ever prayed for is suddenly on the line?

 

ON AUDIENCE

“When I write I aim in my mind not toward New York but a little east of Kansas.”
John Updike
“I don’t write for my friends or myself…I write for it for the pleasure of it.”
Eudora Welty
“I’ve always tried out material on my dogs first.”
John Steinbeck



HALLIE:
When I first started writing, I had no idea if what I was writing was any good at all. My sister Delia, whom I trust completely because she never sacrifices honesty for nice-ness, was the first person who asked me that awful question when I gave her an early essay: “And what exactly is the point you’re trying to make?” To which I said, uh, ah, well… because I didn’t really know. She was also the first person to say, “You’ve got talent.” Her saying it made me believe in myself. Is that pathetic or what?

So, who do you write for? Whom do you trust to read your work in progress?

RO:
Good questions. This is probably a little scary (especially if you're my editor) but I wrote Pushing Up Daisies for myself. The only platforms I thought about were in a shoebox in my closet. I thought I had a pretty good story to tell and wanted to see if I could tell it. And I did. And eventually two other people thought it was pretty good. So now I guess I'm writing for the three of us. Nobody reads my work in progress. After a third or fourth draft, I'll let my pal Kathy read it, and trust her to tell me if I've lost my mind. Are you volunteering?

HANK:
I'll read it! I'll read it! I can't believe you haven't let me read it yet, as a matter of fact.

When I was writing Prime Time, I would bring in my daily pages and make my husband (a lawyer) read them. He would dutifully read, dutifully laugh. Then then, after a few weeks, about chapter 5 or five, he said, Honey, is something going to happen soon? Yeah, I knew that was a problem. So he still reads, but I fear it's as much for reassurance that I'm not terrible or making some embarrassing legal mistake.

Still, now working on the revisions of book 2 and the proposal synopsis for book 3--at every page, at every word, I picture someone else reading what I wrote. Over my shoulder. Shrugging. Commenting the whole way. Huh, so what's original about that, one hovering 'reader' will say. Oh, that's kind of funny. Yeah, okay I like it. Whoa, unlikely, says another. Predictable. Hilarious. Tangential. The voices are constant. It's like writing with an imaginary but pushy critique group.

If I please the ghost readers, I'll try it on real people. But only when I'm completely finished. No one else reads it along the way.

JAN:
I think in the first draft, for the most part, I'm writing just to make it all work, to make it surprising, and to reveal the characters -- especially the brand new ones -- to myself. I have to figure out who everybody is, what they are after, and how they are going to collide.

On the second draft, I'm thinking a lot more about the reader and I'm looking for ways to make the writing sharper and richer, and the characters deeper. I've got a picture in my mind of the tired, fatigued eyes, reading my book in bed at the end of a long day, and I'm trying like hell to make them jump on to the next chapter -- despite the late hour.

As for who I trust to read my in progress? That's you Hallie. Barbara and Floyd, too. My writers group helps keep me from taking too many wrong turns, along the way. At the very end, I give it to a few trusted volunteers with fresh eyes, usually my cousin Laurie and my friend and fellow writer, Naomi Rand to read the novel as a whole. If I have time, I give it to Robin Kall, a Rhode Island buddy, to catch the Rhode Island mistakes.

HALLIE:
Yes, thank goodness for the writing group. But sometimes I wish I was the kind of writer who was so sure of herself that I could just write without showing it to anyone. That thing about writing being a solitary endeavour isn't really what it's like for many of us. I suppose if I didn't have them there would be little voices in my head, and then you never know where that takes you.