Becky Levine: NAMW Guest Speaker September 2009
Critiquing Memoir: Being Professional with the Personal
Guest Speaker: Becky Levine
Date: September 11, 2009
Times: 11 am Pacific | 12 noon Mountain | 1 pm Central | 2 pm Eastern
Cost: Free for NAMW Members
Become A Member of NAMW Today to take part in this teleseminar!
Anyone who’s been part of a critique group knows the challenges: sharing your writing with others, absorbing and understanding feedback, taking that feedback back to your manuscript for revision. A strong critique is a gift to a writer, but nobody ever said hearing it or working with it was easy.
Memoir writers are in a special, very specific, situation in regard to critiques. While everybody’s writing is personal—containing our own feelings, ideas, and often experiences—memoirists are putting their life stories right there on the page. There’s no layer of fiction between them and the details, no protection between their experiences and the comments they’re going to hear about them. For some memoirists, the critique process is complicated further. They may very well be writing for themselves or their family, rather than publication. Unless their critique partners understand and accept this, the author can feel pushed in a direction they don’t want to go.
Encouragement and respect need to be a part of any critique group. In this teleseminar, we’ll talk about how to give and receive supportive, constructive critiques that help each writer move their project forward…on the path they choose.
- The Triangle of a Critique Group: Critiquer, Author, & Listener
- The Critiquer’s Jobs
- The Author’s Jobs
- The Listener’s Jobs
Becky Levine is the author of The Writing & Critique Group Survival Guide, coming from Writer’s Digest in January, 2010. Becky has worked with her critique partners for over a decade, and she worked as a freelance manuscript editor for many years. You can learn more about Becky at her website and blog, www.beckylevine.com.
