So the first week of the SGC is behind me now. First impressions? It’s done what I expected it to do in that I have a group of writers to chat with, but mostly it’s applying just enough of that expectation of accountability for me to get things done. As much as I’d like to say that I can do things without some sort of oversight, I can’t. At least not on a regular basis.
But I have gotten my thousand words a day done, and I am very convinced that I have no idea where the story is going right now, which is not surprising. It’s that part of the book and I knew I was going to have difficulty with it. Right now I just have to convince myself to keep writing because that’s the only way I’m going to figure out what’s going on and get an actual story in the end.
More on the actual SGC, I really enjoyed the way we did the bubble method of receiving critique. In the past it’s always been that the critiquers are supposed to ignore the critiquee, and the critiquee is supposed to pretend not to be there, but that can be really hard to do. When someone says something about your story, you want to defend it. And even if you’re not defending, you feel the need to nod or agree with what people are saying. Since we were on zoom, the critiquee turned off their mic and camera so they could be neither seen nor heard. This means that I (when receiving critique) could respond, and emote and whatever, but they had no idea I was doing so, so they actually had a conversation among themselves, talking about what I had written. It was actually really cool.
And even though I plopped them into the middle(ish) of my story, and they didn’t have the benefit of the first part of the story (There is a story sketch they get that gives them some information, so they didn’t go in blind.) I still got some very good feedback on the scenes I gave them. So now the concern is that many of the newer scenes I’m writing, because I have so little idea what I’m doing, might be worthless for critique. But I keep reminding myself that I signed up for this class mostly just for the accountability. So anything else I get out of it is just bonus.
Now that I’ve spent time writing this, it’s time to get to writing my actual story. Goals are the same as last week, 1k words a day, and doing the two meetings, though this week I don’t have anything of mine being critiqued, so I just want to be a good critiquer.
