SUNDAY, June 8th | Writers do their work alone, but don’t have to be lonely. A solitary writer is missing out on an essential tool for developing and completing projects in any genre—regularly responding to and learning from a partner’s work.
Like the pairs of writers on a late-night TV show, a critique partnership fosters bursts of creative brainstorming while providing consistent feedback. This one-to-one focus can ensure a new level of accountability and editorial analysis beyond writing classes and writing groups.
In this class, we'll examine how to find a writing critique partner, set up the work exchange, and manage editorial feedback and accountability. We’ll practice the kind of burstiness* that makes a writing partnership a great match. We think a critique partnership is the best antidote to writer’s doubt or lost momentum, and a platform for dreaming big.
We’re not Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, but we’d like to think we have some of that special sauce in our critique partnership, which started in-person in the Bay Area and now takes place virtually between Napa Valley and Baltimore.
*Burstiness is like the best moments in improv jazz. Someone plays a note, someone else jumps in with a harmony, and pretty soon, you have a collective sound that no one planned. At The Daily Show, the room just literally sounds like it's bursting with ideas.
– Adam Grant, regarding an interview with Trevor Noah
This half-day class will have three segments focused on defining and finding a critique partner, managing burstiness and boundaries, and maximizing the short-term and long-term benefits of this partnership. There will be exercises, examples of working relationships from the trenches of the writer’s life, and time for collaboration and questions.