Critique discussion says most of my story was very good, but the ending sucked.
We critiqued my short story this week in the ongoing fiction writing class.
I didn’t know if I had the nerves to sit through it, but this was a story I had written years before, and my emotions weren’t so vested in it. So sure, why not?
Dan (the instructor) has set up the critique structure as:
- Determine one-line description, TV Guide style.
- Discuss what’s working in the story.
- Support the story – how could we make it better if we were writing it for ourselves?
Through this, the class considers the writer to “not be there,” so supposedly no one has to worry about hurting feelings. Actually, hurt feelings are still possible, but we seem to be a good group at phrasing things kindly. And Dan has stressed that the people learning the most from the critique are the group, not the writer. Which actually turns out to be true.
I not only survived, I got a lot of validation.
The first 90% of my story was good – characters, rising tension, dialogue, sensory details. They really liked it! But I “punked the ending” by taking a shortcut to end it. (Not actually, but I knew the end when I started, which created the same result.) I took the decision away from my protagonist and left her literally hanging in the wind.
I had planned on learning from the critique, but not re-doing the story. However, I know how to fix a particular character interaction, how to explore possible endings, and I’m pumped up by the general reaction to the story. So guess who’s working on a rewrite during her freewriting time?
