The Group Experience Part 1
How to Start a Group
Rowena Cory Daniells
For convenience, we'll divide this advice into three parts as follows:
The Group Experience -- how to establish, promote and nurse a group of fledgling writers.
Being Professional -- how to present yourself and your work professionally.
Critiquing -- how to give and receive a good critique.
The Group Experience What do you want from a writing group? If your goal is to reach publication standard, what you don't want from your Writers' Group is a cup of tea and a pat on the back. You want constructive criticism that will help you polish your writing craft. And that criticism must come from people you trust, whose motivation is to help you become the best writer you can be, because that is their own motivation. If this is the case, your Writers' Group Mission Statement would be:
To establish a supportive environment where individuals can grow as writers, with the goal of publication.
How do you start a group? Even with the Internet, writing is an isolated venture. A supportive Writing Group can sympathise with your rejections, rejoice with your sales, share market news and writing tips, and develop a mutual critiquing service which will help you hone your writing craft. It helps if your group is genre specific. If you are writing Young Adult book and no one in your Writing Group has ever read a YA, then they can critique the technical aspects of writing, Characterisation, Narrative drive and View Point changes, but they won't know if you are using genre trope clichés. Your group doesn't need to be too tightly genre-focused because there are areas of overlap. For instance, the Speculative Fiction genre includes Fantasy, Science fiction and Horror, and all their sub genres. Many readers of the Spec Fic genre will read YA Fantasies and can give feedback on them. If you are writing Regency Romance, many Romance readers will read this subgenre, although they may be trying to writer Historical Romance, or even Romantic Intrigue. A Mystery or Thriller writer could still get feedback from a writer of Paranormal Romance, because there are Mystery and Thriller elements in Paranormal Romances. If there isn't a local group which specialises in your genre, start one. To help you form your group, go on-line and Google Writing Groups in your genre. You will find Writing Groups that give feedback on-line but it is really worthwhile to meet in person. Look for an on-line group which is based in your country, so you can get in contact with members in your area. Join the group's E-list and listen in. I'm going to use two particular groups as examples because I've been involved with both of them for over 10 years. (Both are non profit organisations, set up to benefit members). VISION writers (Speculative Fiction) http://www.visionwriters.org/
Romance Writers of Australia http://www.romanceaustralia.com/ Vision writers has an E-list, with an on-line critiquing component, as well as face-to-face meetings. Members of Vision set up Fantastic Queensland, which organized several workshops to help writers, the most successful of which is Clarion South http://www.clarionsouth.org/. There are national SF Conventions as well as state Cons each year, and these Cons have panels specifically for writers. Romance Writers of Australia (RWA) offers competitions which give feedback and place the winners' work in front of editors. They will also help their members start groups. RWA run a national conference each year, with tutorials for new, emerging and established writers. Attending one of these RWA Conferences or the SF Cons is a great way to meet fellow writers and learn things you wouldn't learn sitting at home.
If you can't find an on-line group to lend a hand establishing your writing group, you can still go ahead and start one.
Step One Join your state Writers Centre. This is worthwhile because they run workshops on the craft of writing and host panels where you can hear industry professionals speak. They will also offer advice on setting up writing groups. Step Two
Find a place to hold the meeting - somewhere central, somewhere comfortable (air conditioning) and somewhere you can make tea and coffee, or go to a nearby coffee shop afterwards to chat. Libraries are very supportive. (Librarians love authors!). Step Three
Get the word out. Send an email to the on-line group you've joined, asking if anyone lives within an hour of you and wants to start a group. Ask your state Writers Centre to put something in their newsletter to promote the new group. Contact the local Community Newspaper. If the local bookshop owner is supportive, ask if they will put up a notice on their notice board. Some bookshops are very user friendly and welcome writing groups. Contact the local community radio. Maybe they host a Writing Program, which will help the get word out about your group.
Step Four Now that you have a place to host the group and a few interested people, set up the first meeting. Take along a notepad and get people to write down their contact details, email etc. Decide on a time for the meetings. For example: first Monday evening in month, from 6--9, or if evenings are no good, second Sunday in month from 10 till 1pm. (2-3 hours is more than long enough. People's concentration starts to lapse after this). Make it a regular meeting time and skip December (too many parties and family commitments). Step Five
You'll need two spokespersons: yourself and someone else who can provide their contact numbers for interested writers. Put these names and numbers on any promotional material so that people who are interested can get in touch. Have a little spiel worked out so that both contact people give the same information. For example:
We're the [Area] [Genre] Writing Group. You don't have to put work in to be critiqued until you are ready. You can do it anonymously. We're a friendly bunch. We meet on the X at X and it costs $X.
Step Six
Decide on a cost for the meetings. If you are going to supply tea and coffee and biscuits, you'll need to have some money in the kitty to cover this. The last thing you want is to get bogged down in administration so keep it simple. Have a book for people to tick their names off (new people can put down their contact details) and a tin to pass around so people drop their contribution in it). Step Seven
You may decide to form an on-line group so you can keep in touch. This is easy to do, just follow the prompts on Yahoo. This e-group will mean your primary Contact Person can send an email the week before the next meeting, with the meeting time and a reminder about the Writing Exercise. Via the E-group you can let everyone know if you've made a sale or had a rejection, or if you've heard about a writing competition. Your on-line group is a great way to sustain the group's enthusiasm.
What do you do at a meeting? Step One
Pass around the book and tin, welcome any new people. Then report any house keeping. For example: the Contact Person can tell the group if there have been any enquiries or mail. Step Two
Go around the table. Each person says their name, what they are interested in writing, what they like to read and admits to whether they've managed to write anything this month. For example: "I know I said I was going to finish that short story and send it off, but the kids got sick and then my husband caught the flu and I haven't finished it yet." Or, "I got a rejection on that novel I've been waiting on for the last six months". Or, "The Editor has asked me to do a rewrite!" As you get to know each other you don't need to spend as much time on this part, but if someone new comes along go around the table so the new person gets a feeling for the dynamics of the group. After you've been going a while you might just ask if anyone has any news. If someone discovers a
good book on the craft to writing, they can bring it along and explain why it is worthwhile. Maybe they could condense what they've learnt from the book into their own words and share it with the group. Someone might find a really good article on how to write a synopsis. Maybe this will make the group think about doing an exercise on writing a synopsis. Or someone might say I'm really having trouble with my novel. I can't get the plot to hang together. After discussing this, the group might discover they would all benefit from a published author running a workshop on this topic. If your group is regional you may get funding to bring people out to run workshops. eg.
- Writing SF,F & Horror.
- Writing Mystery and Suspense
- Writing Romance
- Writing for Children.
- How to Plot.
- How to research your family history.
- The art of short story writing.
- How to write and sell articles.
- Characterisation and Point of View
Take a look at your state Writers Centre's web site to see what workshops they are offering. This should give you some ideas. Your local librarian may help you fill out the applications for Regional funding. Or, if you contact you state Writers Centre and say you have a group of 10 -15 people interested in a specific workshop, they may have the budget to fly the tutor out to you and you will only have to pay the tutorial fees. Step Three
After you've got the business and catching-up out of the way settle into critiquing. (We'll come to this in the section on critiquing). Each month appoint a different person to be the Spokesperson. (It might help if you have name tags at first). By rotating the Spokesperson's job everyone gets involved. The Spokesperson can tell new people the rules of critiquing.
What will you critique? Try writing craft exercises. You may be fortunate enough to find a published writer who can mentor your group; otherwise everyone is new to writing. In the first year of your group's existence it is worthwhile to run a series of writing craft exercises. Good writing is good across all genres. When your group does basic exercises on the craft of writing, think of it as learning the building blocks. The VISION group started out doing writing exercises. We kept this up for around 18 months, then we decided it was time to move on to complete short stories, where we could put all the things we'd learnt in the exercises into practice. Be flexible If something doesn't work for your group, talk about it. Try something else. Allow room for your members to grow as writers, as your group grows.
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Ann Harth
