Getting the Best from a Writers Group

The window looked through influences the attitude in relation to what is seen.

Writers Groups are Everywhere

Writers groups exist worldwide. Having sampled listings of writers groups in half a dozen states—Alaska, Montana, Maine, Arizona, Nebraska, Florida—I finally asked Google AI if writers groups exist in every state. Yes, they do. They also exist in Europe, Asia, India, Australia, South America, and Russia.

In short, they’re everywhere.

Living locally and being fortunate enough not to have to go on Zoom to attend one, we might not place ourselves in the worldwide context. Besides, it’s a little overwhelming to think so many writers exist, especially when it’s so difficult to break into print, the element of competition restrictive…but also motivating.

Perhaps the best reason to contemplate the reality of so many of us attending writers groups, is to open ourselves up all the more to the sociability of writing. We don’t need too many limits imposed on us.

One of the most severe we can suffer is limitation, each of us, to ourselves alone as writers. And not only is writing, indeed, often thought of as strictly an individual endeavor, there’s an element of truth to that idea.

Because, fundamentally, no one can finish your poem, essay, or other form of writing but you alone. We get so deeply involved in our creative process, it can seem we need no one else involved.

Come Out Into the Open

We forget—when we think of writing as strictly individual—that how the reader will receive the work is not the same as how we read it. That alone is a strong reason to have others read your work and tell you what they think.

But other reasons exist, too. My first experience with a writer’s group happened at age 19. Naturally, I wanted to be involved about my own and others’ work. That celebration of the writing life among others by enjoying each other’s work and examining it, in addition to working on it alone, is exhilarating. Having others read the work might not be as exciting as having it published, but not only might others reading it amount to your making it publishable, it is illuminating to make each other’s work an object of interest.

Various writers and their works are remembered decades later.

Taking a semester off from college at the time of my attending that first writers group, I had also connected with writers there at school. I served as a staff member of the literary magazine of Lynchburg College, Prism, so I already had a sense of the sociability before I attended the group.

Exciting and full of promise, that’s how I remember it. And it inspired me to attend a weekend writers workshop a year later. Open space on all three counts, rather than enclosure in myself. I had begun getting published in outdoor magazines at age 16, when I knew no one else who wrote, although I immediately took interest in a high school journalism course. Soon, my ambition to become a novelist accompanied my writing poetry, for which the Lynchburg magazine was opportune.

In Person Rather than on Zoom

Just last week, I drove over to St. Luke’s Church in Gladstone, maybe five miles from my home in Bedminster, New Jersey. My wife, Trish, and I go there at Christmastime, and I had read information about a writers group posted on a bulletin board two or three years ago. I so much wanted to attend, but my job at a supermarket forbade the possibility until this year.

I will attend my first meeting—in person, not on Zoom—on Friday. In the meantime, my wife also found a notice on a supermarket bulletin board about another group meeting at the Bernard’s Township Library tomorrow night. I’ll attend both, bringing along copies of a couple of poems I’ve recently worked on.

I have done Zoom meetings. All of the Somerset County Photography Club’s Photo Critique Night used Zoom, and I felt very effectively, but given the choice, I’ll show up in person. Doing meetings “remotely” diminishes that feeling of coming out into the open.

For 15 years, I was a member of Schooley’s Mountain Poets. During the last years of the group’s existence, eight or nine of us met once a week at the group leader’s home, drinking wine, reading our poems, and talking about them.

The Harsh Light

I can’t say the value of the critiquing slipped after Schooley’s Mountain Poets left Washington Valley Library, but in such an intimate setting, a certain quality of meaning business was lost. Because the world out there is institutional as much as it’s studded with homes, and writing submitted for publication partakes of business as much as it does of art.

The light of the library or the meeting room at the church has a harsh edge, compared to that of the well-furnished living room. It helps group members distance themselves from the works of others they read—as well as their own—so that their evaluations might be more comprehensive. The obvious drawback, compared to reading in the comfort of a living room with a bottle of wine, is a loss of emotional warmth.

The harsh light has a critical edge.

Constructive Criticism

Critical, but not nasty. I’ve known of well-founded friendships lost, in one case because someone got nasty while critiquing a friend’s work, and in another, because someone lacked tact in explaining an overuse of the passive voice. In both cases, the downward spirals over the issues caused the loss of friendship more than the instigating factors.

No matter how disappointed you may feel in the work of someone deeply respected otherwise, keep the respect in him as a person. There are all sorts of reasons why a writer can slip in a big way, and they’re usually innocent.

Friendship

For several years, memoirist, poet, and novelist Sheldon Vanauken and I engaged correspondence. In one of his letters to me, which he always wrote on index cards as if to save on postage, he wrote, “I think of my books as letters to my friends.”

Stunning words.

I’ve always thought of books that way ever since. Good books, that is. After all, Aristotle wrote The Nicomachean Ethics for his son, a work that contains some of the best writing on friendship ever done.

Recently, I finished reading On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner. He speaks in that book of making friends who will lift the burden of writing, and although I happened to visit St. Luke’s only a day or two after I finished reading the book, I had no conscious sense of being moved by the realization that I sought just that kind of friends. Now I think that’s exactly what I was doing.

For the most part, other members of a writers group will remain acquaintances you see once a month, which works out just fine. In a sense, they are friends who support what you do. After all, a writers group amounts to collaborative effort, and being comfortable with one another makes it smooth. And yet, it’s possible you’ll connect in even more of a sustaining way, possibly finding someone who will mentor your development as a writer.

If that’s needed. Even well-published writers, like yours truly, seek out writer’s groups for the specific comradery. Perhaps the opportunity for friendship is the best a writers group can offer.