My critique group just went through a very painful episode in which one member was banned from submitting anything for a while. The situation was this: the writer had been submitting chapters of something she’d written several years ago. This in itself is risky (as I’ve pointed out elsewhere ), but not really a problem. What made it a problem was that the writer wasn’t bothering to revise the chapters she was submitting before she submitted them. Thus each week her submission contained the same errors she’d had the week before. The people who read her submissions became tired and frustrated with pointing out the same things over and over again. The moderator tried to explain what was wrong to the writer, suggesting that she spend some time working over the submissions, taking care of the obvious errors before sending it in, but she refused. She wanted the whole MS critiqued before she started making any changes. The moderator finally gave up and told her to stop.

I was one of the ones who was frustrated by those submissions (although, I swear, not one of the ones who complained). When you take the time to do a very thorough critique, you want to believe that your comments have some impact, that, in fact, the writer is listening to you. This doesn’t mean that that writers must unfailingly do what a CP tells them to do—writers and critiquers can have honest differences of opinion on some things. But if a CP points out that you’ve got serious problems (like POV shifts or missing explanations or garbled prose), you need to at least take heed and try to avoid doing the same thing next time around.

I think most of us in critique groups are willing to put up with submissions that have lots of problems: That’s part of the price you pay to be part of the group. But if you know the writer in question is going to have the same freakin’ problems week after week, you start wanting to avoid her if possible. For example, as a former copyeditor, I have a hard time reading through mechanical errors without trying to correct them. But if the writer has so many mechanical errors that I lose the thread when I’m reading, I may start sounding testy after a while. It’s one thing to miss the occasional comma. It’s another to throw in semicolons with reckless abandon and without any clear idea of what they’re supposed to do. Does that mean I expect other writers to be mechanically perfect from the get-go? Obviously not (although I can always dream). But it does mean I don’t expect to see semicolons used with the same cluelessness in the next MS I read from this author.

In the end, it all boils down to time, as it frequently does with writing. Submissions with lots of errors take a lot longer to read. Like most critiquers, I’m willing to give other writers that time at least once or twice. But if I seen the same thing over and over again, I’m going to start feeling like my time is being wasted. And that, as Don Corleone used to say in a very different context, I do not forgive.