One of the most valuable tools a writer can have is a good critiquing group.

For a time, when we lived in the Florida Keys, I drove to Miami once a month to sit with other writers and critique each others work. Even after a change in my work schedule forced me to give up that pilgrimage, I maintained contact with two of the other writers in the group, and they continued to read my work-in-progress.

That was my novel, Lifting Up Veronica.

When we moved to Seattle, and I began to write short fiction in earnest, I wasn’t able to hook up with another group, and my work suffered. Then, the Every Day Fiction Writers’ Group came to be.

The suggestions I have received from other writers in the group have been invaluable, but I have found that there are differences between a face-to-face group and an internet group; good and bad.

The bad is that you have to post work to be critiqued and wait, for which I have no talent. Life makes demands; not everyone in the group has the amount of time I have to devote to all things writerly, and so those waits can be frustrating.

For the good, critiques, when they come, are less complicated by the hang-ups of face-to-face communications; and when presented by someone who truly is interested in helping you improve your writing, the results can be incredible.

Stand and Deliver is a great example of the magic of a critiquing group.It is a tale of the Pizza Dude. I conceived the character as an unassuming fellow with superpowers, who uses his ability to manipulate the flow of time to help him in his chosen work. Delivering pizzas. However, he is not above acting as a good Samaritan when the need arises.

I was so pleased with the results, and when I submitted it to the group, Dave MacPherson posted almost right away, praising the story, calling it “fast and funny”. And then he said, “My one question. Is the fantasy element necessary at all?”

Was it? I rewrote the story and Dave was right; the Pizza Dude didn’t need superpowers to be a hero. And the story wasn’t different, just better. It was right there in front of me, but I was too close, too invested in what I already wrote, to see it.

I liked the rewrite so much, I sent it to Boston Literary Magazine and the editor replied twenty-four hours later; she said, “Fantastic. I love it. You nailed the sense of a True American Hero … a great, great job!!”

What writer doesn’t love to hear such words?

If you would like to read the Pizza Dude’s adventure, check out Stand and Deliver at Boston Literary Magazine.

The post, in a slightly different form, appeared at K.C. Ball’s blog, Now Playing in Seattle, on September 26, 2008.

K. C. Ball is a retired newspaper reporter and media relations coordinator. She grew up in Ohio, with her nose in a book, and she now lives in Seattle, a stone’s throw from Puget Sound.

Her flash fiction has appeared on-line at Every Day Fiction, Boston Literary Magazine, Fear & Trembling, Residential Aliens, Every Day Weirdness, Flashshot and Moon Drenched Fables, as well as in print in Morpheus Tales, Murky Depths and the 2008 Best of Every Day Fiction anthology. Her longer stories have also appeared in on-line and print magazines.

K. C. is a staff reader for Every Day Fiction and a Finalist in the 1st Quarter 2009 Writers of the Future competition.  She blogs about writing at A Moving Line and about whatever may strike her fancy at Now Playing in Seattle.