I’ve been in writing groups pre-computer, email-based, and face-to-face. In every case, the groups were different. Way different. Yet they all worked because we set the ground rules at the outset and followed them.
In the first group, we were a group of five or six. We met for a few hours every two to four weeks. We started out meeting at each others’ houses. Then when we were attempting to bring in a few new members, we moved to the local library. Our system was simple – bring a story or poem. Read it out loud. Then listen as we gave you feedback. Except for the gawd-awful incident I brought up yesterday, it was a very successful group. It may still be meeting – I moved out of the area, thus ending my relationship with a great group of writers.
The second group was email-based. There were six to eight of us in the group, and all new members had to be vetted before being allowed to join. Here again, the rules were simple. Each week we’d set up a day for a meeting – usually Thursday. We’d send out our writing to the rest of the group before Tuesday and the group members would read them all, and in one large email to everyone, would offer a critique of all work submitted. If you missed two email meetings, you were no longer considered a member. You didn’t have to submit, but you did have to let the group know by Tuesday of each week if you were submitting something. As time went on, we modified that system – one week you submit, the next week you critique. That also worked well, as it gave a little more time for us to read and respond.
The third (and final) group is face-to-face. We meet one evening a month. As I described yesterday, we have a rip-roaring good time gabbing for 30 minutes, then it’s down to business. The structure is similar to the first group in that we read aloud and then receive criticism. However, we have no time limit. Since we’re once a month, we go until everyone who’s brought something to read is finished. We’ve gone until 11:30 in some cases, but we’re all pretty much fine with that. It is, after all, just one night a week.
When you’re putting together a group or joining an existing one, consider the structure. Will the group go beyond your bedtime? If so, are you okay with that? Often members with kids at home can’t always make that commitment. Will members read aloud or will you expect/be expected to email ahead of time and have edits/suggestions ready when you meet? How many members are you willing to have? Some groups have 15 or more – ours has five and that’s more than enough, in our opinion. Because our structure allows all members to bring a piece for consideration, there’s no way we’d end at 11:30 if there were more people. In fact, our group had swelled to nine not so long ago. Everyone suffered. Members were complaining that they hadn’t time to read their pieces. Others stopped bringing anything more than three pages. Some just didn’t show up because they weren’t getting anything out of it. It was then we decided that given those factors, plus distances folks were traveling, we’d split the group down geographic lines. It was painful, but it was necessary to regain the effectiveness of the group.
Having been there, done it, here’s what I suggest:
Consider your format. How are you going to meet – in person or online? That makes a huge difference in how you’re going to set up your group rules. Will your members send work ahead or read out loud at meetings? If it’s an email-based group, what’s your timeframe for submissions and critiques? How will you address membership rules, such as attendance?
Determine a meeting time/schedule. We all work, so once a month is all we can muster. Often even that gets tough to pull off. How often will you meet? Will you have time limits to your meetings? If so, how will you enforce them?
Limit membership. Unless all members are willing to send ahead and do critiquing at home, it’s going to become too cumbersome too quickly. We’ve decided to keep membership at five. Any more than that would water down our critiques. Think about it – if you have five people reading, four people critiquing each of those readings at even five minutes apiece, that’s twenty minutes per person. That’s assuming the critiques are only five minutes long.
Have a member approval process. We’ve been lucky – so far all our members have been good writers. That’s because we recommended others to the group that we knew personally. But it could’ve easily gone ugly had one or more people not fit with the personalities of others or had been beginning writers looking for editors.
Know the level of writing you’re after. Our group would not be a good fit for a beginner. Most of us are working on novels or short stories, and collectively we have a gazillion years of hard knocks under our belts. A beginner would feel out of place. Also, we don’t hand out assignments. Beginning writers often need verbal cues or assignments to get the creativity going. While we’d love to help, there would be an unevenness to the relationship and everyone would feel awkward – most of all the newbie.
Who gets to present? This one seems simple to me – open invitation to all members to read at any meeting is best. That’s my opinion. Others love a system where each writer is given a particular meeting to present. I think that discourages participation – are you really going to show up if you don’t get to read anything for the next three meetings?
Do you belong to a writing group? What’s the system you use? What works? What doesn’t?
There’s also a lot of debate about whether people should all be working in the same genre or not.
I think groups with a wide variety of projects are more effective, for me, both as a critiquer, and as a writer, since I work in more than one genre.
I agree that a high level of commitment is important. There’s no such thing as “no time to read” each other’s pieces if you read between meetings. It’s about priorities, and if someone keeps giving that excuse, obviously the group isn’t important to that individual.
Devon, I think the reading requirement depends on the group itself. In my current group, we don’t read ahead. We read aloud for one reason – to get the benefit of the self-editor. I learned in J school that reading one’s work aloud was one of the critical steps to the editing process. In our last meeting, I caught a number of mistakes in my piece as I was reading it.
For an email group, it’s critical to read ahead. Otherwise you’re scrambling to read and then respond all in the same day.
It really does depend on the group, I think. For us, we send ahead if we want to, but it’s not a requirement to read it. In fact, if it were, I’d be guilty every time. I often work up until meeting time, and I often write the same day. It’s the pressure of the deadline that gets me motivated. 🙂
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Lori,
I do read my own work aloud — or I tape it to hear it — or I have actor friends read it for me. It’s important — especially with dialogue.
But I find it impossible to critique something if I only listen to it. I’m listening to the performance as much as the content (probably because of my years in theatre).
I need to see the words and hear distinct voices in my head as I read in order to effectively critique it.
Which is why I don’t join groups that read the work in the group anymore.
I also find the discussion is deeper when the work is pre-read, going further into themes, context, logic, etc. than the grammar, sentence structure, and basic editing that happens when you hear it for the first time in group.
With the last writers’ group in which I participated in, for six years until we all moved out of NYC, I would go home and write immediately, still on the rush from the group. I’d read the other material about a week ahead of time, so I could read it several times for comment, and then I’d rework my own material to be handed out at the next meeting a few days before.
Once I broke out of writing up until the moment of the meeting, I found my quality went way up and I was less frantic and frustrated about it. It needed less rewriting, and the critique was less about basic editing functions than content, which is what I wanted and needed.
The negative about the way we worked is that, because we were responding to what was handed out at previous meeting, but working on what was discussed at that meeting, sometimes we were working non-sequentially, and there was a two-meeting time lag (we met every three weeks) between the responses from the previous meeting and the changes we made because of that meeting.
That got a little confusing sometimes.