Having a writing partner means you are working on a special skill: that of giving illuminating, constructive, relevant and encouraging feedback. A successful critique makes the writer want to rush to the computer and begin working on the piece again. He is encouraged that the reader found lines to admire, and excited to get clear and constructive suggestions for improvement. The critique adds to his knowledge of himself as a writer and to what he knows about his voice.

You may worry that you aren't good at critiquing-that you know when something doesn't sound right, but not how to explain it or fix it. As one of my students commented, "'Wow, how fabulous!' didn't seem to be what my partner had raced home to open her email to hear."

But as a reader, you already know a lot about writing, whether you realize it or not. To borrow Nabokov's phrase, you can "rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs." You already know a great simile when you read one, as when my student Georgia wrote that an old lady in the nursing home called out hello to her as she hurried by, "like a survivor hanging onto wreckage hailing a passing ship."

1. The most useful way to begin, often, is also the simplest: just read it and tell her or him not what you think, but what you read: "This is a scene between a mother and a daughter, in which the mother seems to be trying to." For example, a writer will be astonished that what the writer meant a tender piece about her mother's mobile home park comes off as sneering (as I did).

2. Don't read looking for what needs fixing. Writers learn more when you point out something they are doing right than when something doesn't work: there's a lot doesn't yet work in any piece of raw writing.Read for pleasure, stopping only when you have to. At the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, they ask workshoppers to consider each piece as if it has already been accepted for publication-an approach that respects the writer's accomplishment while making suggestions to make it even better.

3. Respond to the writing, not to the story being told. Try not to tell stories of a similar thing that happened to you when your daughter came home from college or a neighbor dented your car. It's a natural response, but takes up too much time. Student Evi Strauss says, "If we're going to be friends, I care whether we agree and am curious about your viewpoint about the content of my work. But I'd rather keep that part separate from the critiques." A writing partnership is not a support group. A woman named Linda Robinson took my class knowing she had less than a year to live after her cancer came back. She read aloud her piece about going to the funeral home to choose her coffin. "As Joe showed me options from the Lenin-lying-in-state model on down to the shoebox-in-the-backyard version, I had a sudden pleasing vision of being buried in my jewelry box. I asked Joe if you could provide your own container for cremated remains. 'Yes,' he said, 'but you'd be surprised how many people neglect to bring a lid.' I told him I guessed Saran Wrap would be tacky.'" The class roared so hard the cat ran off, and one woman had a fit of choking. "You laughed," Linda exclaimed gratefully. "I'm so glad you laughed." Linda's classmates suggested she drop the first paragraph about driving into the funeral home parking lot. They admired the part where she peered at the shiny rich wood of a coffin and fogged it with her breath, and needed the part about the incense made clearer. No one had the poor taste to express sympathy. The trip to the funeral home was her material, not news about her life. A writing club is like a marriage. You end up hearing everything there is to hear about somebody else's life, from the way she felt the day her mother died to the summer she spent with the Peace Corps to how trapped she feels in her job. But you don't commiserate, or give advice, or scold, or launch into your own similar stories. You talk about the writing. It helps to refer to the protagonist of the piece as the narrator, not as "you." Once it's on the page, it's not your writing partner, but a character. You say, "Why does she think that about her mother?" not "Why do you think that about your mother?"

4. Check in with your partner to find out what sort of response she wants. She may not want a critique at all. She might just want to pile up pages, with you keeping an eye on her to see that she forks over her 500 words. She may instinctively know that critical response-even effusive praise-is wrong for her when she's in the zone and cranking out pages.

5. Keep checking in with your partner to see how she's receiving your comments. Ask her to let you know what she wants to know. My friend Janis Newman just published Mary, a fictionalized memoir of Mary Todd Lincoln. I was her partner starting out. She had to fire me when she sent me a scene and I returned it with a comment that began, "I'm afraid this needs a lot of work." Full of myself, full of how I would write the book, I allowed myself to dwell on what wasn't working, not on what was. Janis said that when she read that first sentence she didn't dare read on. She was smart: she protected the tender early draft of her book by finding gentler readers.

6. Be mindful of the gulf between your response and what your partner, who is back at her house checking her email every five minutes, is hoping to hear. Avoid an authoritative tone. "This might work better if?" or "It might read more effectively if?" are good gentle openers. On the other hand, blanket praise "This is so great!" is not as useful as knowing exactly what is so great about it. Writers need to know what they're doing right: Seething, I pull even with the driver's side of the Jeep and latch onto the rear-view mirror. Behind the tinted glass a fearful blonde hastily locks her doors. GREAT SENTENCE

6. Don't comment on style, word choice, punctuation and other sentence-level matters in early drafts. You're to be congratulated for knowing a dangling modifier when you see one, but let your eye skip over it--your partner is trying on outfits-- seeing if the red blazer will work all right with the long black skirt and the low heels-- not going out the door to the interview. Picky little nits can overwhelm and discourage her and make her stare at the piece she wrote with such enthusiasm as if it's a bathroom tile floor that needs scrubbing with a toothbrush. Polishing comes much later, when your partner knows which sentences she'll keep, and she IS (to keep the metaphor going) about to step out the door for the interview. Then you definitely want to let her know about the spinach in her teeth. Feel free to wear that red pencil down to a nub as you point out anything and everything that catches your eye: an unidentified "we," tense shifts, a need for new paragraph for a change of speaker, confusing chronology, quotation marks go outside the period (in the US), missing transitions, dialogue that's taking place nowhere in particular, when the language appears stilted or vague, and so on. Tell her that it should be her barely detectable wig, not decipherable wig.

7. How's the pace? Where do you want the writer to pause, tell more? Where do you want him or her to speed up? Tell her where your mind wandered, where you got bored.

8. When does the conflict start? At what point do you become really interested? (It's usually the same paragraph.)

9. What are you told that the author could try to find a way to show instead?

10. Ask for examples: If she writes, "I've been to a lot of lesbian potlucks in the last 30 years, and the menus are always pretty grim," demand to see some of those menus. If her dad is ranting about the government at the table in a childhood memory, ask for a snippet of his conversation.

11. Ask why a lot.Why would Paula believe her mother? Why was the narrator sent to her aunt? What was she hoping would happen?

12. How does the problem get resolved? What's the epiphany/resolution?

13. Recognize when the piece works. Mark Childress, author of Crazy in Alabama, led a workshop in which the participants raked a story over the coals. He listened to it all and then said, "All this story lacks is a stamp." He told the writer to send it to "The New Yorker," where it was published.

The writing field is filled with people who find it hard to accept criticism. This is especially true of writers who have trouble separating their work from themselves, and thus feel attacked when their work is criticized. And who can blame them? When you ask for criticism, criticism is the last thing you want. I know that when I ask someone to read a piece of mine, and say, "Tell the truth," I mean, "Tell me in what ways this impressed and astonished you."

My student Linda Kilby said, "To give feedback you need to have a clear mind, an open heart, and be aware of your own prejudices. To get feedback essentially the same thing goes -- you need to have a clear mind, an open heart, and a strong spine. Tighten your belly. You and the work will get stronger and stronger."

There's probably a Kubler-Ross type stage for writers getting a piece back from even the gentlest partner. Denial-what do you know? Anger-is that all you see in the piece? Despair. I'm going to give up writing right now, so I won't be hurt this way again.

1. A critique is relevant if it tells you what you suspected, but maybe didn't want to hear, or if it points out the strengths of the writing to you in specific ways, so you know what you're doing right, and its weaknesses, so you know how to start revising. If you can't learn to identify both, you will never be able to overcome weaknesses or fully exploit your strengths. Above all, you want to find someone whose comments leave you eager buoyed by praise and energized by useful suggestions for improvement. You will probably have several writing partners before you find the one for you. Things can go wrong for a lot of reasons-she'll pick at your grammar or give you blanket praise, or just not get you, or vice versa. Sometimes the partner is just not on your wavelength. You wouldn't send a funny book to someone not known for her sense of humor, no matter how strong her critiquing skills. I am the wrong person for new age books, therapy books, and other reading outside the realm of what I enjoy. I recommend my website, Matchwriters.Com, for finding like-minded writing buddies.

2. Get responses EARLY, before you've poured six months into the piece and will be found hanging from the light fixture if a partner timidly asks you if you really need the scene where the aunt loses her umbrella

3. Don't freak at her silence
When you send a piece to a partner, you naturally envision your pages gleaming white on an otherwise empty table, in an otherwise empty room in her otherwise empty house. A ray of sun lights up the pages from you that she has printed out. This is all your partner has to do: read and admire your piece. It's right there! And yet she, a nice person, does not do it. You tap your fingers, glare at your email. Nine pieces of Spam come in, but nothing from the partner who agreed so enthusiastically to send you her writing and read yours. There's only one possible explanation for her silence: the piece is awful beyond words, and she's trying to figure out what to say that won't lead you to hang yourself from the chandelier. Can she admire your typing? Your choice of indented rather than block paragraphing?
The real explanation? She's busy.

4. Sifting I am finally learning to take comments, negative and positive, in person and in writing, without crawling under a rock. I appreciate being told the positive first, then constructive criticism, including negative comments-- easier to hear then. I'm learning to sift out what I can use. -Roberta Wurtz Take all criticism, compliments, and suggestions about your writing lightly: only you know what's best for the piece. Never make decisions (such as tossing your book, or sending it right off to your agent) based on one person's opinion. But keep in mind that advice you resist most may be exactly what you need to do. You know your partner is on target when you find yourself slapping your forehead. "I knew I'd have to change that part!"

Most critiques will be better for pointing out problems than for offering solutions. For that, you may want to consider hiring a professional. Your partner is responding mostly as a reader and a writer, not as a trained editor.

A good writing coach can save you a whole draft of a book in a couple of hours, just by going over your plot with you. According to the Brenner information group, it takes, on average, 475 hours to write a fiction book, and 725 hours to write a nonfiction book. If someone saves you a draft, she saves you 725 hours. My friend Jackie Winspear began coming to my house once a month to go over her latest pieces with me for an hour. One day she had some pages for a detective novel called Maisie Dobbs. She got stuck in a traffic jam by the Pennzoil station in San Rafael, when in a mid-daydream she got it: the character Maisie Dobbs, investigator and psychologist, for a mystery novel she didn't even know she had in her. In the 10 minutes the Pennzoil station promised to do an oil change, she had the plot of a novel. I read her pages every month, filled with envy. All I said was, keep going (at book readings she tells the story of how even after she broke her arm falling off her horse, I said, "You have another hand, don't you?). Maisie Dobbs was published in 2003 and became a national best-seller and the winner of all sorts of prestigious prizes. It was followed by three more in the series. Now I hate Jackie of course . But you get my point-she paid to come to my kitchen table every month, and look at that result. I have hired my writing partner Janis Newman, about whom you will hear a lot, to read the chapters of this manuscript for me for $100 an hour. That's what I charge myself, and I consider it cheap. I sent Tristine Rainer, author of Your Life as Story, the outline of my work in progress memoir, Lagunitas, and got a reading that didn't just change how I was going to do my book: it changed how I thought about my father. It wasn't exactly encouraging (she started by saying she didn't know whether I needed an editor or a shrink more).

To email a writing exercise, copy it into email from your document. When you get your partner's emailed piece, just open the email and hit Reply. Now you can type in comments. Use all caps so it's easy for your partner to tell your comments from her prose. I use the word "NICE" in place of the yellow highlighting I use on paper.

If your word-processing programs are compatible, you can also send the exercise as an attachment. The advantage of this is that you can open it in, say, Microsoft Word, which has a cool option under Tools has called Track Changes. You turn that one on and can make all sorts of suggestions without wiping out the original document.

When you have several writing partners rather than one, you get a greater variety of responses on your work, and of course, you have more of other people's work to read. On the positive side, having more than one partner reduces the flake factor: if one partner is on vacation or swamped with work, you are not left on your own. If there are several of you, you might send out pieces in rotation: This Friday Mary sends a piece for all to comment on; next Friday it's Sam's turn. The critiquing works the same as with a single writing partner (see what's posted under Writing Partners). You might start with a single writing partner, and then once you're comfortable together the two of you can scan the profiles for a third. . If you want to have the chance to meet in person, then obviously you will search for people where you live. It's vital that group members be at a similar stage in their writing, so that some are not acting as teachers, and others feeling discouraged and feeling they aren't good enough to belong.

Then send messages to the group from My Page I would think an ideal large group would have about eight people, a small one three to five. Three is good because you can easily read the work of two partners, and won't have to take turns to send out work. Take new members on a provisional, we're-just-seeing-if-this-is-a-fit spirit, and agree that if it doesn't work for the group or the new member after a few rounds, then no hard feelings on either side. Discuss expectations, how you will send one another and when, and what kind of responses you find most helpful.

Our class is still meeting twice a month. We meet as a "large" group with Clare and Diana who come into Berkeley from San Francisco. Sandy, Rodney, Olsen, Valerie and I meet twice a month at Sandy's house. Valerie had a piece accepted by Parent magazine for a grand sum of $750.00. We were all thrilled. Rodney had that very moving piece he read to the class about the death of his sister published in a Wisconsin paper. Clare had a wonderful piece in the Examiner about comparing New Yorkers to San Franciscans. I thought it was a really well written. Sandy had the piece she did for our class (about not wanting to throw things out) accepted by a magazine (I can't remember the name of the magazine) but she got a nice check for it too. It's amazing how our little group has bonded. We're all writing and encouraging each other. But beyond that there's very good work being done, being taken seriously and being published. I like it that we all look at the writing process as something vital to our lives and take it seriously, not just a hobby or for fun.