Why I never leave out that first critique...

I told you that you could do it, and you did.

And you know what, you still can.

Dedication, desire, discpline, determination plus persistance.

Michelle, pleased and proud to be your critque partner.

Great post, Donna!

My editor asked me to do some revisions for An Honorable Rogue (this was no surprise as every novel I've had published has had revisions!!).   But these were hard revisions, and doing them was the most brain-boggling thing I've ever done.   But the thing is, I knew my editor was right.   So I did them, and because I knew they would improve the book I enjoyed doing them, despite the difficulties.

Best wishes

Carol

I just wrote a crit saying the internal conflicts causing an external conflict between my CP's hero and heroine wasn't resolved (except off-screen between The end and the epilogue). I haven't posted it, or my crits of that last third of the book (which basically said we should be making progress towards solving these conflicts.)

I guess I wonder if I should. Another CP of my CP (we're in a group so I can see other crits) wrote what a wonderful, made-me-cry ending it was.

And it's so hard to find pluses in this book that can come close to balancing my basic message -- your book needs a lot of work.  Should I say what I think? What if no one else thinks so?

SAO

Revisions are the art of writing. Perhaps when an author has written for decades, there may be less or no revisions, maybe in part because they revise themselves or revise internally as they write, but revising is a technical skill. When I took photography, I had these dreamy ideas and took some cool photos, but it wasn't until I did all the rigorous but boring technical precision work that I was really free to be creative. I wanted to do all this cool, offbeat, cutting edge photography, nothing like Ansel Adams. But when I started mastering the art of exposure and mixing my developing chemicals from scratch, I got control over it all.....and the cold mathematical technical side helped me to make things all the more cutting edge and eerie if that makes sense. I know books are a business, but they are also art in words. Technical skill is everything...and revisions are every bit a part of the art as are brushstokes in painting, dodging and burning with light for photographs, etc. Even if a reader doesn't remark on the technical side of a book, it is the technical side that gets through, that makes a story how it is experienced by the reader.

I am a new romance reader, but as a reader, I love the feelings romance evokes --- but an author having a lot of feelings is not what is going to produce that effect in the reader...it's hard, cold, down and dirty technical work. If Donna and Carol are talking about the books I think they are, as a reader, I can say I feel the effect of the revisions they mention because those two books had something a little extra for me.

One Presents author I like very much has a sparse writing style in all her works. I don't even read that line very much but I love her writing style a lot so I buy anything she writes. Now, sparse doesn't mean better because I am also growing fond of another Medical Romance author who is almost the opposite in style. it's just something that this one particular writer does very well. I was visiting her bulletin board and heard her talking about how she just writes, pages and pages and more, and then cuts. The cutting is part of her genius, part of her art.

One of the worst books I read last year wasn't a bad book... parts were brilliant. It just felt like a first draft in bad need of more editing. I just read a horrible book that was so horrible I can't even blog it. (Not a Harlequin book.) It wasn't the content really. I could even tell her intentions would have been cool but her structure and style conflicted so much with the content and her purpose.

I have done a lot of expository academic writing, not fiction, in my life and I can definitely tell you that in that arena, revisions were everything. Some papers took less revisions, but they were revised in my head. I also think that lots of experience revising one's work eventually starts influencing how one writes in the future from concept to first draft.

and I'd like to ask a question.  At what point does a wannabe find a cp?  I am planning on doing the SD pitch, and I would love to have someone to bounce my writing off of.  Especially as I'm beginning, just to make sure I'm headed in a good direction.

However, I'm a newbie, NO experience.  I understand (and desire to have one) what a cp is, but I'm not sure I understand how it works.

Since ya'll were there once, I'm turnin' to you!

Thanks, I enjoy thinking about books.    I am however the typo queen, I think, especially now that I need a new keyboard.

I did go to sleep wondering if I had said something on this thread quite like I wanted.  I loved both Donna Alward and Carol Townend's writing from the first books of theirs I have read.  What I am noticing in both of them from book to book is a refinement in their writing style.  It's not that previous stories weren't great reads, it's more like their writing increasingly has extra plus, that extra power behind it.  

A critique partner can be very useful.  I wrote a review this week.  Even though it was only a page long, I worked almost all day on it because it was a complex work of suspense.  I rewrote it several times and even so, my husband caught a bad typo and several other things. I was just too close to it that I did not see that I had used the word both in way too many sentence structures.  I do like the blogs and being able to write more spontaneously sometimes.   I am having a bit of performance anxiety about a couple of reviews of great reads I need to write but they were so easy to blog.  

Donna, do you think having a steady critique partner helps with performance anxiety when a writer might be tempted to think and not write?