Coffee & Writing

I’m writing a memoir and I submitted ten pages, which was all of chapter one, for critique night. As people were reading it, my brain went into my stomach because I saw wasn’t up to my standards and could have been written so much better, but that’s something that could be fixed in the final draft. No problem.

Then, people started to raise their emoji hands throughout to makes comments. A LOT of people raised their hands. A few people said there were phrases they liked and then went onto saying what could be done better of what they didn’t like. It was about twenty people I went through hearing their critiques. I closed my laptop with a broken heart. My outline was six pages, it even had pictures, and here I was finally writing about it. I was going to pitch it to literary agents this weekend.

However some good came out of it, I found the thing that had been missing from the first one, so I was able to take their critiques and realize I was telling the wrong story. Now, I have a skelton outline of the new story and two days to write at least one chapter or maybe I will just enhance my outline. I think enhancing my outline will probably be my best bet. I don’t want to do a rushed job with a chapter.

Miriam Kavanagh