My First Critique in Months

I sent a chapter of my NaNoWriMo project to a friend this week.  She is a friend from grad school and an insightful writer and editor.  I knew the chapter wasn't "done," but I needed to get it off my desk and into a reader's hands.  I wasn't disappointed.

For me, there comes a point in any writing project when I need a set of eyes to tell me if what I am looking at is true.  For instance, the chapter I sent out had two of my main characters in it.  The chapter began in the head of one, but finished in the head of another.  I suspected that I wasn't executing this well, but I felt I needed a reader to let me know if my impulse was right.

It was.  One of the first things my reader commented on was the fact that the chapter seemed fractured and that she wasn't sure who her emotional allegiance was with.  This confirmed the fact that my writer's intuition is still working.  You see, when you sit for a long time with a piece of writing, you can become too comfortable with it, you can overlook things, and you can become complacent with the way it looks because you wrote it and, personally, you think you are kind of awesome.  Don't lie; we all think we're pretty awesome at some point in the day!

Now the chapter is back in my lap and the work of revision begins again.  For this chapter, it means rewriting it two different ways so that each of the characters is given their due.  It also showed me something else about my book.  While the novel will follow four characters and each of them will have dedicated chapters, there is one character who will be written in first person.  I had written him in first person before, but abandoned it.  I think I will be returning to those older pieces and resurrecting his personal voice.

As my grad school advisor and the children of Narnia used to say, "Onward and upward!"