The class critique of my first-draft manuscript is over – now the work begins for a second revision!

The critique entailed receiving feedback in the form of letters and annotations on the manuscript – eight people’s feedback, our instructor and the other seven people in my class. In addition, we spent an hour in our monthly class meeting discussing the manuscript. I scribbled notes. The result is a lot of information to process.

I know how to write a good scene, I told myself going into this critique, but I’m less confident that I can create believable character arcs over the entire novel. This was, at a high level, the major thrust of people’s comments.

Readers had positive things to say about the descriptive prose and narrative style in my work. No major plot holes were uncovered (Whew!), although pacing was flagged as being slow in parts and the timeline for when information is revealed needs a hard look to ensure that tension remains high.

But, but, but… certain characters were called out for being not believable or inconsistent – back to the character arc problem. The biggest challenge for me, I think, is the arcs of the major characters. When readers don’t understand why a character does something, that’s a problem – and this happened a lot. I fear that I am not deep enough into the main character, not pushing, pushing, pushing to understand how he’s dealing with the shit I’ve thrown at him. I want him to be happy and not suffer. But that’s not going to happen, owing to the presence of the aforementioned shit. Changing this is going to require thought and thought and thought, then revision.

I’m currently in the organizing phase of revision. I’ve added all the in-text comments to a single version of the manuscript. This will help me see what parts received comments and if those comments were consistent among two or more readers. There are disagreements among readers, of course. For example, some thought that the dialogue of a minor character was cartoonish and others thought the dialogue was funny. How to resolve inconsistencies like that?

Overall, I got what I wanted from the critique: I made my bed and now I must lie in it.