Writing groups hold a classic spot in the lives of authors. We work on our books in solitude, but we’re supposed to let our allies and colleagues make them better. Not just different, as an editor says of his work. Better.
Workshops for writing were the bedrock for my practice, starting 18 years ago. We’d all sign up and promise to meet on Saturdays at 10. I’d lay out a buffet breakfast and we’d gather to talk over our latest manuscript pages. Everybody had to turn in pages two weeks before each monthly meeting.
Then the moment arrived when each author was up for critique. I called it response, because the commentary had to include some praise for what was submitted to the group’s eyes. We’d go around and take note of things we loved, thinks that pulled us away from the writing, plus things that confused us.
That’s a classic workshop experience. In the movie Wonder Boys, the writing program at the university has a workshop session with young writers who are hating on a story submitted for critique. It’s everybody’s fear, and it was writ large in the movie’s early scene. Yeah, writing groups can get that bad. The professor (Michael Douglas) doesn’t step in to slow down the pile-on, but the author doesn’t let it scuff up his belief in his talents.
That last bit is the hardest part of getting help from the workshop experience. As authors we rely on outside eyes, as I like to call them. When you go the way of the workshop group, you rely on the eyes of your fellow writers. They might be published, they might not. A group has a chance of working well when it’s got people at varied levels of skill and experience.
Lots of groups gather writers who are all unpublished. Being published isn’t a marker of talent. But being published at least shows the author has survived the scrum of revisions and edits. They’ve come to see their work as separate from themselves. The writer who’s submitting is ready for measured, healthy critique.
Readers vs. authors
And those who don’t submit yet have an interest and a practice in writing. They’re more like readers than authors, except they have respect for the struggle of making the art on the page. That respect and separation are crucial elements that can make writing groups the opposite of help — when there’s not enough separation of author from story, plus a lack of respect for the struggle.
One author who’s in my orbit described a group that was the opposite of help. The author was writing satire, using academics and gender studies as the story’s playground. The main character is in his early 30s and objectifying women, yet he’s also a victim of his callous behavior. That’s where the story got interesting, because both things can be true.
Watch out: complex situations get misjudged when the solutions are not written out on the pages you submit. You might be unfortunate enough to have authors at your table who judge your main character. “Why did he do this to her? You know, that’s not a nice thing to do.”
Triggers get pulled when a group devolves to become an audience instead of authors. You might be on a Zoom call and hear someone say in a very vulnerable, fragile voice, “I’m not gonna be able to review any more of your chapters. They’ve triggered me.”
In a ill-managed group, this kind of thing allows group members to view an author like a bad person for the story. It’s fiction, but some story writing cannot be tolerated, apparently.
This kind of group is the opposite of help. A bad meeting can put an author off their game so much that their work dries up. The author is trying to represent a wider view than just their own personal experience, and it means they must put people into the trouble of the story. They land you there without any statement that this is bad behavior. There are clues, but the delight of a reader of fiction is to supply the moral, not hear it being told to them.
A group will walk the edge with a story, if everyone is patient with the writing and let it play out. That’s not easy to do with just 20 pages per month. Everybody’s pretty much given away their time in exchange with one another, so there’s only so much of your book that you examine per meeting. Then people have grave questions about what something means in your book, and you can’t tell them, “Oh, just hold on, and I’ll tell you in Chapter Six.” Because you might not have Chapter Six completed yet. You have an outline, if you’re lucky, and maybe you share that.
You can stay away from this problem by girding yourself for the triggering, getting a strong moderator for your group. The members will be reminded that the writing is not the writer, difficult and triggering writing will be shared, and even a repellant character can be captivating. One author friend said he hated a main character in a book and enjoyed rooting against him from chapter to chapter.
Don’t confuse a writing group with beta readers. The difference is the scope of the work you’re sharing. A beta reader tracks the entire book, completed in the latest draft. Writing groups praise, criticize, and influence work in progress. You can make progress on a book with a group. Your ideal group member will let themselves be triggered and stay on your side as the artist. We’re supposed to provide help with a writing group, not the opposite of help.
