Wouldn’t you think writers would be generous with each other? Most of us know what it’s like to stare at a blank page, to send something out and hear nothing back, to read a one-star review at midnight. A room full of people who’ve been through that should be the kindest room on the internet.
It’s one of the cruelest.
I’ve been jumped in Facebook writing groups over questions so small I’ve forgotten most of them. “Go look in the FAQ.” “Other people have already answered this.” “Why do you ask such stupid questions?” Every post I’ve ever made on Reddit drew hostility, no matter how nice or useful it was. I don’t join writing groups anymore. I’ve already written about why Facebook writing groups suck, and the Dogpile series is a running record of what happens in them.
This week I watched it from three directions in three different groups.
A comic book author asked a formatting question and the thread went to war over AI. A nurse writing a whistleblower memoir joined a memoir group and said she hoped she wouldn’t be bombarded with unprofessional remarks just for being new. When one member welcomed her, she wrote back that it was the first time anybody had ever said that to her.
And in a fiction group, a novelist posted an essay about writing rules. He spent the rest of the day trading insults with a moderator, ending with “I have more knowledge about the writing process than you have in your little finger.” Nobody in that last fight mentioned AI once.
So the question isn’t why AI makes writers angry. It’s why writing groups were angry long before AI showed up.
Why are writing groups so hostile?
Rejection, fear and status. They stack on top of each other, and each one makes the others worse.
Start with rejection. Most people in a writing group are getting turned down constantly. Agents pass on their queries. Readers don’t buy their books. Sales dashboards sit at zero for weeks. That’s the normal life of a writer, and it wears on people. The novelist in that fiction group had queried agents for years. A developmental editor in the same thread had sent out about 200 queries on one novel. People carrying that much rejection don’t always come into a room looking to be generous.
Then there’s fear. The market for books is crowded and it pays almost nothing for most of us. One commenter in that same thread had written 82 books and never earned a living from any of them. Now AI has arrived, and to a lot of writers and illustrators it looks like the thing that will take whatever small income is left. Frightened people lash out at whoever is closest. In a writing group, the closest person is usually a beginner who just asked a question.
Status explains the most, though. Why would a frightened, rejected writer go after a beginner instead of an agent or a platform? Because the beginner is the one person in the room they can win against.
Watch: The Psychology of Pile Ons. Uncut with Clare Stephens, Life Uncut Podcast
Why do writers attack beginners in writing groups?
Because the group is the one place where they get to be the expert.
Out in the world, an unpublished writer with a stack of rejections doesn’t get much respect for knowing the rules of craft. In a group, that knowledge is currency. Catching a beginner using an adverb, a dialogue tag other than “said,” a prologue or an AI-generated cover is a chance to show you know better. The correction isn’t really for the beginner. It’s for the audience.
You can see it in the way the fights go. The rule-enforcers don’t explain. They pronounce. “Prompting AI is not creating.” “Learn how to illustrate, ma’am.” “Not affording an illustrator is poor planning.” When somebody pushes back, the argument stops being about writing and turns into credentials. Who has the degree, who has the twenty years, who’s published, who’s a real editor. By the end of the thread on writing rules, one man was telling a moderator he had more knowledge in his little finger than she had.
And the beginner who started it is long gone.
In most writing groups the correction isn’t for the beginner. It’s for the audience. – Richard LoweShare on X
Is the anti-AI crowd the reason writing groups are toxic?
No. The anti-AI crowd is just the newest anti-crowd.
Before AI, the same groups went after people over self-publishing, over adverbs, over “show don’t tell,” over covers that looked homemade, over asking a question that had been asked before. The topic rotates. The anger stays. AI is an especially good target because it lets the attacker feel righteous. You aren’t being cruel to a beginner, you’re defending artists. You aren’t showing off, you’re protecting the craft. That’s a powerful feeling, and it gives people permission to say things they’d never say to a face. When the target is AI, I call it AI Derangement Syndrome.
The pro-AI side is no better when it gets going. In the comic book thread, an anonymous account spent hours calling anybody who disagreed an idiot, a moron and a creep. It wasn’t defending anybody. It was enjoying itself.
I use AI every day as a digital assistant, and I still do the writing. I’ve watched writers on both sides of that fight treat a stranger’s question as an excuse to perform. Neither side helped the stranger.
Does the platform make writing groups worse?
Yes, a lot. Facebook pays out in attention, and fights earn the most of it. A careful answer to a beginner gets three likes and scrolls out of sight. A takedown gets a hundred replies and shows up in more people’s feeds. The people who enjoy the fights learn quickly what gets noticed.
Size adds to it. A group with tens of thousands of members has no memory. Nobody knows you, so nobody owes you courtesy, and you’ll never see most of them again. Moderators are usually volunteers who can’t read every thread. Some of them are among the loudest voices in the room. In the writing-rules thread, the person doing the most insulting in the end was the one being warned by the moderator, but the moderator had thrown a few punches of her own along the way.
What about polite writing groups?
They have the opposite problem.
Nobody knows you, so nobody owes you courtesy, and you’ll never see most of them again.
The Alliance of Independent Authors runs its own group for members. It’s fairly active. It’s also so tame that it’s dull. Everybody posts under their professional identity, the membership is paid, and the moderation is careful, so nobody behaves badly. Nobody says anything that matters much either. Nobody takes a position, and nobody tells you your idea is wrong and why. I’m not drawn to it at all, and it doesn’t help me.
That surprised me at first. I’d assumed the cure for hostility was civility, and civility is all ALLi has. But a group where nobody risks anything doesn’t teach anybody anything. Writers need somebody willing to tell them the truth about their pages. The Facebook groups tell you the truth as an insult. The polite groups don’t tell you at all.
What does a good writing group look like?
Small. In person or close to it. Run by somebody who cares about the writing more than the room.
For a good while I sat in the East Lake Writers’ Workshop, a critique group that met in a side room of the East Lake Community Library in Palm Harbor. Deanna Bennett founded it and ran it. I spent many hours there critiquing her books and other people’s work, and having mine critiqued in return. Her critiques were fair and they were interesting. She didn’t hunt for commas the way so many groups do. She cared about whether the writing worked.
She was honest, she said it in a quiet voice, and she encouraged the newer writers who showed up unsure of themselves. I wrote about her in my tribute to Deanna.
That room worked for reasons no Facebook group can copy. Everybody came back week after week, so everybody had to live with what they said. You critiqued someone’s pages and then sat across from them while they critiqued yours. Nobody had an audience to perform for. The leader set the tone and held it. I only stopped going because the drive to Palm Harbor at that time of day got impossible.
If you’re looking for a group like that, start local. Libraries, bookstores and community centers host them, and I’ve covered how to tell a good one from a bad one in finding a writing group worth sitting in. My piece on how critique groups work covers the rules that keep one useful.
My take
Big writing groups reward fights, and scared, rejected writers supply them. Beginners get corrected because it feels like status, and Facebook pays out in attention. The polite professional groups swing so far the other way that nothing useful happens. Look for a small local group where the same people come back every week and a leader holds the tone. The one I sat in for years in Palm Harbor worked because nobody had an audience to perform for.
How do you survive a hostile writing group?
Ask your question, take the useful answers, and leave.
Don’t argue in the comments. Every reply feeds the fight, and the people fighting don’t want to be persuaded. If someone gives you real help, thank them and follow up in a private message. If the same group goes after you twice, stop posting there. Why let fifty thousand strangers tear your work apart for an audience?
And if you’re the one tempted to correct a beginner, ask yourself one question first. Who’s the correction for? If it’s for them, keep it short and kind. If it’s for the crowd, don’t post it.
The social media hub has the rest of the Dogpile series, and if you’d like honest feedback on your pages from somebody who isn’t performing for anybody, my book coaching is one writer and one reader at a table. That’s the shape every good writing group I’ve ever seen has had. Small enough that everybody has to look each other in the eye.
