Writers' groups

No matter how long you’ve been writing—or how recently you’ve started—your work can benefit from a writers’ group. If you’ve never heard of such a group, it’s simply a gathering of writers who critique each other’s work. Writers’ groups can be conducted in different ways: online or face to face, meeting once a week or every few months, reading each other’s work (which is generally short—a chapter, short story, etc., per session per person) beforehand or all together. The writers might have met one another as friends, as classmates in a writing program, or even as strangers who met at a writing event and wanted to start a writers’ group.

Most of the writers’ groups I’ve been a part of, especially my current one, have been incredibly helpful, giving me insight into how a current draft was working and how I could improve it. But some writers’ groups can be toxic, being not only unhelpful but actually detrimental to one or more of the writers who belong to them. There are plenty of articles, not to mention copious tweets, about damaging writers’ groups and particularly pernicious members. I’ll let you look those up if you like—seriously, it won’t take much digging—but here I want to focus on what you should look for in a writers’ group you want to join—and what to encourage if you’re starting your own group.

Encourage structure, clear expectations, and flexibility. Most writers’ groups won’t survive a lack of flexibility. If you have to meet on the first Saturday of the month and bring exactly ten pages of work or you’re out, everyone will be out by the end of the year because life inevitably intervenes. Likewise, a group can just stop meeting altogether if its members are always postponing meetings and people stop bringing their work for critique. Avoid both extremes by having an established structure and clear expectations along with a reasonable degree of flexibility. For example, my writers’ group meets every three or four weeks (depending on everyone’s availability), we all come to most meetings, and each of us brings work most of the time. Since everyone’s leaning in and doing what we can—and you offer critiques even when you personally haven’t brought work to critique—it works well for us as individuals and also for the group as a whole.

Keep the commentary beneficial. By “beneficial,” I mean something the writer can use to improve the work they’ve brought to the group. Praise that points out a strength the writer can use elsewhere is helpful; unstinting praise that pretends the work needs no improvement is not. Scathing criticism that is vague or implies the writer isn’t up to the task of revision is unhelpful; criticism that points out why something isn’t working well and engages in a give and take about the problem (for the purpose of further explanation, not because the writer wants to defend herself) is very helpful—if the writer chooses to accept that help.

Have a thick skin. This goes for everyone but is much easier to police in yourself, not the whiny kid at the desk across from yours who always insists nobody appreciates his genius. Some writers’ groups institute a cone of silence, in which the person whose work is being critiqued can’t speak at all. This works best for groups who aren’t used to hearing and giving feedback about writing, but it’s a means to an end, that end being the ability to hear what other writers are saying about your work.

It can be hard; I won’t lie. But remember, all you’re doing while being critiqued is listening and taking notes. Listening doesn’t necessarily mean you agree—or that you should agree. You can wait a few days before evaluating whether your fellow members’ comments and deciding what you want to use and how. And remind yourself that if these people are there for the same reason you are—to become better writers and foster camaraderie with other writers—they’re delivering all the bad news not to put you down but because they’re confident you can improve the work you’ve brought in.

Get a group in which writers are on board with the vision behind each other’s work. You don’t all have to write in the same genre or even the same form—my group brings chapters, short stories, script treatments, and screenplays—but you do have to want other writers to succeed in making their next drafts as close to their vision for the work as possible. It’s frustrating when you’re writing a romance and someone in your group declares they don’t like romance and have nothing to say—or worse, have too much to say and end up bashing the whole genre. But if you can describe out loud what you want a certain passage to do (another reason not to use the cone of silence all the time), a good group can help you translate that to the page.