Writing Groups - Pros and One or Two Pitfalls
"It’s a deep kind of trust. Plus there’s the genuine celebration with each success."
Above you’ll find my first (very short) audio greeting with 2 jokes included!
This month marks the one-year anniversary of Bookish 📗. Writing these posts and sharing them with you has been an inoculation against pessimism and inertia. Thank you for your kind words, your subscriptions, and goodwill. The ongoing experience of creating a body of work here really did pull me out of a long period of defeatism in relation to my career as an author. (More about this here, if you’re interested.)
And thanks are eternally due to
for his initial encouragement and his subsequent practical advice when I started this Substack.I can’t send everyone a paper gift or a clock to mark Bookish’s first anniversary, but subscriptions are 25% off this month.
The other day I realized I hadn’t yet written about critique groups for Bookish. Et voilà…✒️
What strikes me as paramount for any writer participating in a writing group is trust. Not only do we hope our fellow scribes will understand our work and offer useful notes (“Why is this novel about a gardener? A drug dealer would be so much cooler”), we also want them to be supportive and diplomatic, eschewing harshness (“This is the most boring story I’ve ever read. Christ on a cracker!”) that in some cases issues from feelings of insecurity and competitiveness.
When a writing workshop ends, students will sometimes share email addresses and form their own group. A few will continue to meet for years post-workshop. It’s the best-case scenario—the writers already know each other’s work and critique style and don’t have to go through a vetting process.
Absent a situation like the one above, when I lived in Chicago, I taught occasional craft classes for Off-Campus Writing Workshops (OCWW), located in Winnetka, IL, which isn’t strictly a critique group, but some of its members do exchange work.
You can cast a wide net by searching “writing groups” on Meetup.com in your city or town. Facebook also has many such groups; some you can join without an invitation from a current member. It will likely take a bit of trial and error to land on the right one.
Although I’m primarily a fiction writer, the critique groups I’m a part of are screenwriting-focused, both growing out of CineStory Foundation feature retreats I attended in 2020 and 2021.
Sometimes due to a lack of time and/or changing goals, a group doesn’t succeed, but original group members might form new incarnations or decide to exchange work with only one or two other people, getting the feedback they need from these helpmates.
Taking a writing class, either in-person or online, might be the most reliable way to find writers with interests and skill levels similar to your own. (StoryStudio Chicago, Grub Street, Gotham Writers Workshop, UCLA-Extension, and Stanford Continuing Studies—which I teach non-degree-conferring classes for, offer numerous creative writing courses each quarter, many online.) And as some of my former students have, you might form a post-workshop group.
I asked fiction writers Angela Pneuman, Colette Sartor, and Sarah Tomlinson to share a few thoughts about their long-standing critique groups, and I spoke with a fourth writer, whom I’ve quoted below anonymously.
From Colette Sartor, recent Bookish interviewee and Flannery O’Connor Award-winning author of Once Removed:
Ever since I started writing in my early thirties, I’ve been in a writers’ group of one sort or another. Being in a group helps me stick to deadlines and see issues in my writing that I wouldn’t otherwise. But there’s more to being in a writers’ group than that. The best ones generate a supportive energy that allows their members to take creative risks without worrying they’re going to be eviscerated.
This is particularly true of a group I’ve been in for over a decade now. We met through our college women’s alumni association, and we write in all genres: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting, TV writing. The beauty of this group lies in our respect for each other. We offer honest criticism in a way that others can hear, starting with what we love about a piece before we move into discussing where we see issues or have questions.
Foremost in our minds is always how we can help the writer achieve her vision for her work. Ultimately, that’s what we’re there for, to help each other bring to the page the worlds we envision in our heads. I can’t imagine writing without these women. They are dear friends whose opinions I trust and cherish.
**
From Angela Pneuman, author of Home Remedies (story collection) and Lay It on My Heart (novel):
My writing group has met for 20+ years, and we’ve seen each other through several books each. There’s something comforting about sharing your earliest drafts with people who already believe in you—you’re not having to prove anything to them, and so you can feel very confident taking risks, and you can feel very confident in their authentic reactions and experienced feedback.
It’s a deep kind of trust. Plus there’s the genuine celebration with each success; something about being along for the whole ride with another writer really causes all the pitfalls, like professional jealousy, to evaporate.
**
From a writer sharing a few pitfalls:
For the most part, I loved the writers’ group I co-founded with another writer that lasted about seven years. I will say one of the challenges was not loving one longtime member’s genre and writing style. When forming a group, I think it’s best to find kindred spirits and people whose writing inspires you. Otherwise, you’ll struggle with having to read writing you don’t love.
I wrote a story with subject matter an experienced writer told me in so many words was about a topic she thought had been done so many times I should try writing a different story. Had I listened to this writer, I would have stopped submitting it to literary journals and missed the opportunity to publish this story with a respected journal.
In another case, I workshopped a piece about a character traumatized by witnessing a suicide. The group suggested major rewrites. Afterward, a group member pulled me aside and said, “Don’t change a thing. It’s perfect.” My intuition told me she was right. I made a few tweaks but didn’t rewrite it per the group’s recommendations. When I submitted it to literary journals, three wanted to publish it.
**
From Sarah Tomlinson, author of Good Girl (memoir) and The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers (new novel) & fellow Substacker (
):I was brought into my group late in 2019 by a close writer friend, who was already a member. I was well into the writing of the novel that would become my debut, The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers. It was exciting and fruitful, as an unpublished novelist, to join a group of novelists who had all published (many of them multiple times over). I soon found that they not only gave great notes but also offered advice, support, and camaraderie.
Of course, their input has made my writing better. But so much of what they've given me has been hard to quantify, just like so much of what is rewarding and challenging about the writing life is hard to quantify. There is a certain flavor of pep talk that can only be given by another writer who has been up to their elbows in your writing, and whom you've also read and worked with just as closely.
I've heard of groups that are specialized around a specific type of writing (thrillers, for example) and have thought about joining a second group that will help me to specifically hone my mystery writing skills, as that's my area of interest right now. But overall, I value being part of a group where we all write quite different styles of fiction.
I'd say we're all interested in character-driven fiction, so we can give each other notes that are helpful on that front, but we also catch different aspects of the writing that may need additional thought or work, because we bring such varied perspectives. (Many of us also write scripts, and so we workshop those sometimes as well, which is also helpful and fun.)
Also, I think so much of what talking about in-process writing can provide is a place for constructive problem-solving. We usually submit whole manuscripts (or book outlines), and along with our pages, we always ask specific questions about characters or plot points we're uncertain about. It can be so helpful to be able to talk about and brainstorm possible solutions as a group. I've also learned things about my own writing by trying to help them solve what they're working on.
We've all become good friends, and I look forward to hopefully working with them for years to come, on many different projects.
I've had good & bad workshops over the years. The good ones offer some degree of validation, although I admit I don't always know which comments to take to heart & which to ignore. The worst thing I ever heard in a workshop (and this was at a graduate writing program) was a well-regarded author telling a student that his writing was so bad he shouldn't have been admitted to the program! Two years later the student's novel was published with a full-page very positive review in the NY Times Sunday Book Review. On the other side of the coin, I once had a teacher who consistently praised a certain student's work, once even calling it "genius." Because I thought his work was average at best, I started wondering if they were having an affair (something that's been known to happen in writing workshops). Ultimately, I've grown wary, although I hope to find another good workshop at some point in the future. Thanks for your post!
Love this! I’m in two workshop groups and recognized many of my own feelings in these points. Thanks.