Jan Christensen-Writer's Groups

Writer's groups. I love them. I've belonged to several. Most disbanded, unfortunately, but a couple are still going.

One that's still in existence meets every other Tuesday evening at a cafe. At each session we hand out a story or chapter for the others to mark up for the next time. We take turns going around the room discussing one piece at a time. The author generally remains silent until everyone has finished. This can often be difficult, and if the author just can't help interjecting a comment, or even disagreeing violently, no one will throw him or her out for talking when they shouldn't. But it's really better to wait to hear everything. If someone doesn't understand something you wrote, your verbal explanations are not going to help your writing.

You need to fix the piece, not explain it.

Sometimes the criticism hurts your feelings. Usually that means the story is close to your heart, and you should work on it more. After the group is done with a piece of mine, I take each handout apart and staple them all together by page numbers. That way I can look at everyone's comments for each page when I revise. Going page by page and line by line, I take each idea under consideration, and pay particular attention if more than one person had made the same suggestion.

I have found writer's groups particularly helpful in pointing out problems with point of view, show, don't tell, a character does something out of character, motivation is weak and transitions.

Besides the valuable criticism, another main benefit from a group is that you feel you have to hand out something almost every time. You begin to pace yourself so you have several thousand words finished and ready to be looked at every two weeks. This production becomes a body of work over time.

And just as important is the sociability of writer's groups. Writing is lonely--everyone says so. And we need to be read, to get feedback. Writer's groups fill that function.

Another thing which can be tried with writer's groups, particularly at a meeting without a lot of submissions, is the ten-minute timed writing. When I first tried this, I was skeptical. The group agrees on a topic, then they write for ten minutes. No one has to stay on subject--it's just a jumping off point. Everyone stops when the timer goes off. The last one to put writing implement down reads his or hers aloud. Then the rest read aloud with no comments permitted. In the groups I've been in, everyone starts writing a short story. One night we did this twice, and by the time I'd driven home, I had three short story ideas rattling around in my head. Eventually I came up with four, finished and polished them all, and even placed three in magazines!

No one knows for sure why this works, but it does. If you don't belong to a group, you can do it on your own. One of my novels started while I sat at home with not a decent idea in my head. I looked around the room, and saw a camera on a shelf. I decided to work for ten minutes writing about a camera. Soon I had the start of a short story which then became a novel. Inspiration can come from anything!

If you don't already belong to a writer's group, I strongly recommend you join or start one soon.

"Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain." --Elie Wiesel