Critique partners are like your mom. And that's a good thing.

Some eleven year old girls aren't awkward.

Sadly, I wasn't one of them.

My city started their first ever Little Miss City pageant the year I was eleven, and like a kid who likes to do everything, I signed up, having no idea what I was doing. Nor having any idea how itchy being up on stage in front of a gym full of people made you. I am talking full-body itch. Head to toe. The kind you can't just ignore.

I was thrilled when I had finally finished "performing" my talent (in which I had a bunch of pictures I had painted on easels, and walked around talking about them in an unprepared script-less manner while scratching everywhere and saying "um" a lot). Afterward, one of the judges approached me and suggested that I enter my talent in a more appropriate venue. The State Pageant of the Arts.

So I did, and I won. Pretty cool, huh? Except that it meant going to an awards ceremony, which occurred on opening night of the performing part of the Pageant.

Did I mention I was awkward?

My mom told me to wear a dress. I liked wearing a dress as much as I would've liked staying in from recess to scrape gum off the bottoms of desks, so I used every power of persuasion I owned to convince my mom that a dress wasn't needed. I had maroon corduroy pants with a matching vest that was nice. --ish. And the best part was, I was already wearing the pants and the shirt! All I'd have to do was put on the jacket! (I was NOT one of those girls who changed clothes dozens of times a day.)

No matter how hard I tried, though, I didn't convince my mom. She still believed I should wear a dress. (Like that pretty one that I wore to Little Miss City!) I was fairly persistent, though, and eventually I won.

At the ceremony, the organizers led us on stage in front of the biggest crowd I had ever seen, to sit in a long row of fifteen kids-- the other winners from the other age categories. EVERY SINGLE GIRL WORE A DRESS BUT ME. And suddenly I remembered that in addition to my maroon pants that were possibly getting a little too short, I was wearing sky blue socks. I'd never felt more uncomfortable (or awkward!) in all my life. An embarrassment my mom had tried to save me from before I even left the house.

Critique partners and critique groups are like moms. They find all of those things in your manuscript that have the potential to embarrass you. They point out the things that don't match. They show where you are falling a bit short. They call you on places where you're being inappropriate. They don't want your sentences to be awkward.

You might not think they're right. You might fight them with all the persistence you have. When you're inclined to fight them until you win, take a break. Even if it's a lot of work to change, take a moment to see if they may just be right. You'll be glad they were there to make sure that before your manuscript "leaves home," you aren't going to embarrass yourself.

The bane that is the girly-girl dress

I have never been a girly-girl. Despite that, my mom took me shopping for a dress as a Christmas present one year, and I fell head-over-heels in love with a girly-girl dress with lots of fluffy layers. The kind that was gathered so much at the waist that when you spun in circles, IT WENT STRAIGHT OUT.

Not long after Christmas, my sixth grade teacher announced that we were going on a field trip to watch the symphony, and that we’d all have to wear our Sunday best. Yes!! Everyone would get to see my fabulous dress!

We went to the symphony and I felt like a princess. It felt weird and not entirely like me, but kinda nice, too.

Then we came back for a regular last-half of the school day. I sat down at my desk, and the the blasted layers grabbed hold of the top of the chair and stayed there! Unbeknownst to me, as I sat down, my unders showed through the cutout in the back of the chair. A little window to display things not meant to be displayed.

To make matters worse, the kid behind me passed around a note.

The note made it through three rows of kids before my bff wadded it up and left her seat without permission to come tell me I had exposed myself to the class.

In high school, I didn’t write. I was too afraid of being exposed to the world. Afraid that someone would read it, think that I was really writing about myself, and judge ME accordingly. Just like with the unders, I worried that even when I didn’t mean to, I’d expose things about myself I didn’t want exposed.

I don’t know when that changed for me. Maybe after reading enough books, especially different books by the same author, and saw how different the characters were from each other. Or maybe I realized that writers write main characters they LOVE, but not necessarily ones they ARE or ones they are dying to BE. Or maybe I just got more comfortable with who I am.

Either way, the I'm going to be exposed! feeling isn't there anymore. Sure, whatever I write will show my tastes, and the good characters will have traits that I love in people, but I guess those just aren’t underwear exposing kinds of things to me.

So what about you? Does being scared hold you back from things? (I mean being scared of the figurative "being exposed," not the literal. I totally understand about the literal.) Has it ever? Or how did you get over it?
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Ugly Pants

I write for 3rd - 7th grade kiddos, so this is the section where I write about a [possibly embarrassing] thing that happened at that age, and relate it to writing. And chalk it all up to a lessons [hopefully] learned.

One evening as fifth grader, I realized that my last pair of clean pants were on me, so I put in a load of laundry. Thinking I could be uber-prepared, I also changed into pajamas so I could add the pair of pants I wore to the mix.

Then, like the kid that I was, I didn’t think about them again. At least not until I woke up the next morning and went to put on a pair of pants and realized I had none! After a frantic search of my drawers, I found a "Saturday" pair of pants. You know the kind-- only meant to be worn when outside doing yardwork, or helping my dad clean the garage-- NEVER meant for public viewing. The other problem? They'd already been downgraded to Saturday pants a good two years before. They were red corduroy with different colored flowers, both knees had holes, and they weren’t pretty even when they were brand new. And oh, yeah. They were also about a foot too short. Not having any other options at the moment, I pulled them on TEMPORARILY, along with a way cute purple patterned shirt, ran to the washroom, and put my load of pants into the dryer.

Just like the night before, I DIDN’T THINK ABOUT THEM AGAIN! I got ready for school, then left. In the disaster pants! Apparently, I didn’t think about clothes much after I put them on, because it wasn’t until the teacher called us all to the back of the room to sit in a circle on the carpet and I spied Perfect Dresser Debbie staring at my clashing self with a look of disturbed fascination on her face, that I’d realized what I had done. Then, one by one, everyone else’s attention was drawn to the flowery, motor oil and grass stained, short-enough-to-be-called-capris-except-there-wasn’t-such-a-thing-yet, holey-kneed (except the holes were now closer to my thighs than knees), pants. And by then, my face was the same color as my pants and it was way too late to do anything about changing them.

My pants? They were kind of like a rough draft. I needed someone to point out that areas should’ve been longer. Or that there were [plot] holes. Or that red really doesn’t go well with multi-colored flowers. Or that stains really distracted from the state it could be in. Or that the theme of my shirt really didn’t go with the concept of my pants.

I NEEDED SOMEONE TO TELL ME. And that’s why it’s so important to have good, honest critique partners that will look at everything! Sure, it’s nice to have people that tell you that you [or your manuscript] look GRRRREAT! It helps with the morale and the self-esteem and the freaking out moments when you feel like your manuscript sucks beyond the telling of it. But unless you want cringe-worthy elements in your manuscript when it’s too late to do anything about it, you also need people who are willing to say the writing equivalent to “Are you really going to wear that?”