Finding a Writing Group Worth Sitting In

The first time somebody told me my writing was good, I was sitting in a circle of strangers reading three pages out loud.

Years earlier a college teacher had told me I had no talent, and I believed it for a long stretch of my life.

A writing group undid that. A room of people with no reason to flatter me listened to a few pages and said it worked. One of them was a ghostwriter, who pulled me aside afterward and offered me a job. That’s how the career I have now started.

So I’m not neutral about critique groups. They’re the most undervalued resource available to a writer, and most of them are close to useless. Both are true, and the difference between a good one and a bad one is the subject of this piece.

Where do writing groups meet in Pinellas County?

Mostly in libraries, so they’re hard to find online. A group that meets in a free library room has no reason to maintain a website.

Start with library calendars and the front desk.

Staff know which groups are running, including the ones that never post anywhere. The East Lake Community Library in Palm Harbor has housed groups in its side rooms for years, including the East Lake Writers’ Workshop that Deanna Bennett founded in 2004 and ran until her death. The Safety Harbor and Clearwater libraries program writing events too.

Then Meetup. It’s where I found more than one group and where I filled the science fiction critique group I started in Clearwater. It’s patchy, and it’s still the largest listing. Then ask writers. Anyone who has been at this locally for a few years knows which rooms are worth sitting in. The good groups fill by word of mouth instead of advertising.

How are online writing groups different?

Plenty of groups meet over video now, and they solve the two biggest practical problems: the drive and the schedule. If the choice is an online group or nothing, take the online group without hesitating. What they lose is harder to name. Reading aloud to a grid of faces isn’t the same as reading to a room, because you can’t feel where the attention goes. In person you know exactly which paragraph lost people, from the shifting and the silence and where the eyes go, and that information never makes it through a screen.

The compromise that works for a lot of people is one of each: a local group for the reading and the company, and an online group for the weeks when getting across the county is impossible.

What separates a good critique group from a bad one?

One question: does the group talk about the writing or about the punctuation? A group that spends its hour circling comma splices is a proofreading service with refreshments. You don’t need eight people for that. You need one editor, and you’ll get better results. What you can’t buy is a room of readers telling you where they got bored. Where they got confused. Where they stopped believing a character. Where they wanted to keep going. Nothing else provides that, at any price.

Deanna’s group was the best I’ve been in and that was her doing. She refused to let it become a grammar hunt. She cared about craft, about whether the historical grounding held, and about whether the writing was any good. She was sharp and direct, in a quiet voice that carried more weight than volume does. Newer writers who turned up unsure of themselves found her generous too, and that’s the other half of running a room well.

How do you get useful feedback from a writing group?

The rules are simple, and almost every failing group breaks one of them. Read aloud. It changes what you hear. You’ll catch the sentence that fails about two words before anyone reacts.

Don’t defend the work. The moment you explain what you meant, the feedback stops, because the group learns that comments produce arguments. Write down what people say and decide later which of it is right. Some of it’ll be wrong, and you can’t tell which in the room.

Insist on specifics, and give them. Feedback like the plot didn’t make sense to me is worthless. Ignore it. Feedback like the spaceship exceeds light speed in chapter six but you established that as impossible in chapter two is something you can fix. Ask for the second kind, and be the person who gives it. Take turns properly. Everyone reads, everyone gets the same time, nobody hijacks the room. That sounds procedural, and it’s the most common reason groups fall apart. One person gradually takes over and the rest stop coming.

What can’t a writing group do?

It took me years and one unfinished novel to understand the limit. Groups read a few pages at a time. That’s a microscope, and it’s excellent for sentences, scenes, dialogue, and pacing inside a chapter. It’s blind to structure. A book failing at the level of what it’s about and how it’s arranged will get better line by line for two years and stay broken. Every session will feel productive.

I’ve watched people do exactly that, and I did a version of it myself with a science fiction novel I’ve been writing for a very long time. The chapters improved. The book didn’t resolve, because the problem was never in the chapters.

The fix is deciding what the book is before you draft it and checking the whole shape periodically against that decision. That’s separate work, and it’s most of what I do now, both as a ghostwriter and in book coaching for people writing their own.

Should you start your own group?

If nothing fits, yes. It’s less work than it sounds.

You need a free room with a door, which the libraries have; a regular night that doesn’t move; and somebody willing to keep order gently. I ran one in Clearwater for about three years, six to eight writers around a table, and because I ran it I ran it my way: craft over comma hunting, the quality of the writing instead of the small stuff.

Keep it small. Six to eight is right. Four is fragile and twelve means nobody reads. Set the reading length and hold to it. And decide the culture early, because whatever happens in the first three meetings becomes the group permanently. One warning from experience: consider the drive. I eventually stopped attending a group I valued because the meetings landed in the worst of the afternoon traffic, and that’s not a small factor across this county at five in the evening.

Why bother

Writing is solitary, it attracts people who are fine with that, and it still goes wrong when nobody outside your head sees the work.

You get three fixes at once from a group. It gives you readers before the readers. It gets you used to your work leaving your hands. That’s the wall a great many writers never get past. And it puts you in a room with people doing the same difficult thing. That’s worth more than the craft advice, because it makes writing feel like something people do instead of something you’re getting away with.

That last one is what a circle of strangers gave me when they listened to three pages and said it was good. Everything since came out of that evening. (See also finding a book club, which is a different room again)

If the problem is bigger than a group can solve, usually a structural problem, that’s my work. As a ghostwriter in Clearwater, I can meet you in person and sort out what the book is. The rest of this cluster is in the Writing in Tampa Bay hub, and the Discovery Intensive settles the shape so the group time counts for something.

From the author

Show Don’t Tell
Critique groups say show, don’t tell, and rarely say what it means. Show Don’t Tell answers that with more than a hundred before and after examples.

Frequently Asked Questions