Knowledge Base

Members submit their stories to the story queue, and pay credits to do so. Only a certain number of stories will be displayed each week so you may have to wait a week or two for yours to come up, depending on how much queue activity there is. When a story comes up for critique, other members can read it and submit their critiques to the author, thus earning credits.

Stories stay in the queue for a week, which runs Wednesday 00:01 to end of Tuesday 23:59 UTC.

To help with queue wait times, we created a custom Newbie Queue. Your first story must be submitted here and, if you wish, you can submit up to three in total before moving to the other queues. When you join the site, you get two free credits, and you can use these towards the cost of posting your first story. Therefore you need to crit one story before submitting your own.

Stories in the Newbie Queue can receive up to five full critiques, while stories in the other queues can receive an unlimited number of critiques. Once your story in the newbie queue has received 5 full crits (more than 300 words each) it will be put into older submissions.

When posting a story, authors have some choice in who can view their story. For example, some authors will specify that only people who have been members of this site for a month can read their story. That’s why you may not be able to view all the stories in the queue.

We've done everything we can to make people feel secure about using the site. Technically, it's safe — people have to be logged on to the site to see any stories, so submitting a story for critique here does not mean it's "published online".

Your story is accessible by the members of Critique Circle. There are different levels of accessibility, which you pick when you send your story. You can have the story visible to all members, only those who have critiqued, or only those who have critiqued recently. 

After the crit week has passed, you can hide your story, so nobody else can see it, or you can delete it from the site.

For those who would like to work in a private critique group where everybody knows each other, there is the option of supporting the CC with a small donation, and receiving premium privileges in return. The Premium privileges include the possibility of creating your own private queue and forum. That way you can be sure that nobody outside your own crit group can see your stories.

Critique Circle is a closed community of writers whose purpose is to allow authors to submit and receive feedback/constructive criticism on works in progress, and such submissions do not constitute publication.

All rights remain the sole property of the author. Any use or reproduction of stories or critiques associated with stories is prohibited without the express permission of the author.

Critiques become the property of the author insofar as they pertain to the original work, and using critiques you've given that disclose any element or part of an original work by another member is also prohibited without the author's permission.

It is important to recognize that ideas, titles, names, and phrases cannot be copyrighted, and you have no protections or guarantees that an idea for a story you propose will not be used by another. Critique Circle recommends you only post original, developed content if you're not worried about someone using an idea you've come up with.

At the top of the page there is magnifying glass icon. Clicking on this icon will open up the Global Search Bar.

As soon as you start to write the bar will search CC for you. Here you can look for answers to common questions, you can look for other members, stories, forum posts and even glossary entries and stories by genre.

Try entering your own username or your favorite genre and see what happens. You can also just ask it questions like How to earn credits? or writing crits.

When you submit your first critique, just tell the author that you're new. Most people are more than happy to help out newcomers. And, just for this purpose, we have a team of Moderators who can answer questions — you can contact them by sending a message to Moderator.

When you submit your first critique, you can request a review of your critique from a Moderator. They'll give you helpful pointers for areas you can improve on — and don’t worry, they won't bite. They chose to be Moderators because they enjoy helping people.

Also, search the Knowledge Base and then, if you have any additional questions, you can send them to a Moderator or post them in the Newbie Questions Thread (the most current version is sticked at the top of the forum).