There is probably a critique group that meets occasionally somewhere near you. Google it. Contact whoever's in charge, and join up.
Today.
I'm not telling you this so you can show up and start getting your work critiqued, though. You should go so you can critique the work of others. Here's why. At your new group, you're going to read a lot of different kinds of stories from a lot of different kinds of authors. You'll read stuff that you would never have picked up on your own--the zombie novel from the twenty-something dude who wears hoodies all the time, the romance novel from the sixty-something lady who wears sweaters with cats on them. The western. The freaky S&M novel. The biblical fiction.
You'll read these stories and more, and nearly every single one of them will be so bad that you want to gouge your eyes out. If you're lucky, you'll at least laugh.
But, when you read this stuff and you think, "My God, this is terrible! What the hell was I thinking?" don't stop there. Go through that manuscript with your studied writer's eye and pick it apart. Figure out why it's bad. Figure out what isn't working, and figure out how to fix it. It's an incomplete puzzle with an infinite number of solutions, and it's up to you to figure out the one that works best for you. And then you articulate your thoughts into words and make your comments.
But don't say things like, "Deciding to read this is the worst mistake I've ever made; you should do us all a favor and stop inflicting your writing upon the universe," because being an asshole doesn't help anybody.
Instead, say things like, "The Duke is being mean here and it feels like it comes from nowhere. Is this cruelty intentional? If so, perhaps John should comment on the strange behavior."
Say, "You spend four paragraphs describing this room only to have Bertrand immediately leave it--does this room come up again later? If not, consider trimming this description."
Say, "Consider showing me this in scene," or, "Maybe we don't need to see their tea and scone afternoon snack at this level of detail. Consider summarizing these pages."
If you're in a room full of people who take their shit seriously, they'll appreciate your honesty. And if you're not, they'll think you're mean and they'll ignore you. And that would be their loss. You're not there to pat anybody on the back, and you're certainly not there to spare anybody's feelings. You're there to learn to recognize what makes bad writing bad, and you're there to learn how to avoid making similar mistakes in your own work. If you want to learn to write well, learning how to not suck is the first step.
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