This article first appeared in The Working Margins, our newsletter.
One of the many topics we touched on in Working Writers #3 was the idea of learning from critiquing others. This likely doesn’t occur to most new writers, and we wanted to delve a little deeper into it.
The basic idea is that it’s easier to learn—and apply—new ideas by identifying problems and effective techniques in other people’s writing than it is when digesting someone else’s critique of your writing. Until you’ve experienced this in action, there’s just no way to grasp how true this is.
As near as we can figure, it’s due to our brains being forced to both identify and articulate why something is either problematic or good. When we’re digesting a critique of our own work, we tend to sort of accept or reject the lesson. We grok those lessons much more fully when we have to reason out what we’re saying and why we’re saying it. And, once we’ve identified that problem in someone else’s writing, suddenly we see it when we do it ourselves.
That’s why we say we look at the opportunity to crit someone else’s book as a huge opportunity, rather than an obligation. Yes, it will be great when they crit your book in return, and that’s all well and good. But the things we’ve learned from critting others have been instrumental in making us better writers, so be selfish and critique other people.