ON THE VALUES AND BENEFITS OF
PARTICIPATING IN WRITERS’ GROUPS.
March 1990
A friend of mine, a talented young writer, just moved from Virginia to California. She was excited about the move, but told me she expected to miss the two writing groups of which she had been a member. “One of them is very incisive,” she said. “They criticize everything—they really tear it apart. And the other is very New Age and do-your-own-thing, and they love everything. Between the two of them, you get a good balance.”
Writers’ groups play an important role in the lives of a great many writers. For the most part, such groups serve the needs of writers who are functioning on an amateur or semiprofessional level, publishing infrequently if at all. But this is emphatically not to say that a writers’ group is a childish thing to be put away upon reaching professional maturity. I know a group of a dozen or so successful veteran writers who meet regularly, not so much to share their work as to discuss common problems and items of mutual interest. And I know a woman who recently signed a ten-million-dollar contract and who still meets once or twice a month with the group of which she has been a member for the past 30 years. She regularly reads her work to her fellow members, and claims to profit greatly from the feedback she receives.
I can’t furnish an inside view of writers’ groups because I’ve never been inside one. While I can understand their appeal, I’ve always been inclined to privacy in my approach to writing. I’ve never cared to show work in progress, and over the years I’ve reached a point where I’d sooner breakfast on road-killed armadillo than let somebody read something before I’d finished writing it.
Nor have I ever much wanted criticism. All I really want is praise, lavish and abundant praise, and if you can’t supply that I’d just as soon not hear your views on the subject. I’m not fool enough to think my writing is perfect, but that doesn’t mean I want to be told what’s wrong with it. All of this very likely amounts to a character defect on my part, but it’s one I seem to be prepared to go on living with.
I mention this to advise you of my lack of expertise on the subject, and lest I seem to be beating the drum for something I’ve avoided in my own life. That said, I’d like to look at some of the things a writers’ group can provide.
Perhaps the most obvious benefit is feedback. In a sense every writer is flying blind, piloting his sullen craft through starless skies. This is especially true of the beginner, whose work is not being read regularly by an agent or an editor, and who cannot generally find a qualified person to read it without paying a substantial fee.
The need for feedback is probably less acute with short fiction. You spend a few days or a few weeks writing a short story, tuck it into an envelope, drop it in the mail, and wait. Whatever comes back to you, be it the manuscript itself or a letter of acceptance, constitutes the sincerest form of feedback.
Even so, a rejection slip isn’t wildly informative. It won’t tell you much beyond the fact that whoever read it didn’t like it enough to buy it. It may have just missed and may be chock full of literary merit, or it may be absolutely vile. Either way, the same slip winds up clipped to its corner.
The neophyte novelist, however, not only is working in the dark, but also must remain in the dark for a whole Arctic winter. It is, as we have frequently observed, a great act of faith to write a novel, and that faith is sometimes sorely tried when one has to work for months or years without any way of knowing whether the emerging book is wonderful or hopeless. Who could fail to wonder from time to time how it’s going, and if it’s any good?
Fellow members of your writers’ group will tell you. Whether you’re writing short fiction or a novel, they’ll show keen interest in your work and let you know what they think of it. They’ll assure you that they liked this scene while expressing reservations about that one. They’ll praise your dialogue but find your description a little weak. They’ll discuss your characters until you believe that they believe that they’re real people. They may suggest ways for you to revise what you’ve written, and tell you where they think you should send it.
But what’s their feedback worth? That’s an interesting question, and one you may find yourself trying to avoid asking yourself. In order to profit from the group, you may want to banish the thought that all of you are nothing but the blind leading the blind. But suppose it’s true? Are you really getting anything useful? Does it really matter what these people think of your work?
I suppose that depends somewhat on the group. And, in any group, some members will be astute readers capable of incisive criticism, while others will not have anything very valuable to say. Over time you will very likely learn whose criticism to heed and whose to ignore.
It seems to me, though, that a group of writers can provide benefits above and beyond the feedback one receives. The feedback seems to be the justification for the group, it’s why the members say they’re there, but it may not be the most important element at all.
The first and perhaps most important thing a writers’ group provides its members is an audience. Membership in a group virtually guarantees that a certain number of people will be regularly reading your work (or having it read aloud to them, depending upon how you structure things). This may look at first glance like part of the whole business of feedback, but I think it’s a thing apart.
One of the chief frustrations of writing is that it so often seems to us who do it to be an incomplete act. Writing is communication, and if we don’t get to communicate to someone, what’s the point?
That, I think, is why so many of us are so utterly obsessed with getting published. Even if we aren’t truly driven to become professionals, even if we’d be perfectly happy functioning as Sunday writers, we can’t feel altogether comfortable about being unpublished because our communicative process remains forever incomplete. Why go to great trouble writing something if it’s not going to be read?
Belonging to a writers’ group assures you of readership. Even if you are years away from writing professionally and reaching an audience through the printed page, you can be read right away by people genuinely interested in finding out what you have to say and how you’ve set about saying it. They won’t be first readers at a publishing house, scanning a couple of pages and then affixing a rejection slip. They’ll read every word, and they’ll take time to figure out how they feel about what they’ve read.
Another very real benefit of group membership is that it can help provide a structure for part-time writing. If I know there are half a dozen people expecting to hear my next chapter on Thursday night, I’ve got a compelling reason to write it now rather than put it off a few days. One of the most difficult things for part-timers to do is prioritize writing, and unless we assign our writing a high priority we simply won’t get around to it. There are too many other demands on our time for us to write something nobody wants to read anyway. But when we know there are people waiting to read it, people who will look at us funny if we show up empty-handed, we have that much more reason to sit in front of the typewriter tonight instead of the TV or the sewing machine.
If the feedback we receive is of questionable value, the feedback we supply is clearly worthwhile. Not necessarily for the person who gets it, but for us who give it.
By this I mean that one of the best ways to develop insights into one’s own work is by seeing what does and doesn’t work in other people’s writing. We learn to write by writing, but we also learn by reading. Unfortunately, we usually try to learn by reading the published work of superior writers—and that’s not likely to be hugely informative.
We can learn faster by reading the unpublished work of amateur writers. It’s not smooth, it’s not completely professional, and it’s in manuscript rather than a bound book. The critical faculties are less in awe that way, and the flaws are more accessible.
Writing is a lonely business. I don’t know that there’s any help for that. When all is said and done, the writer has to face a blank sheet of paper and has to do it alone. For all the people who may wind up on the acknowledgments page, all the people without whose help we swear we couldn’t have written a word, we still ultimately do it all ourselves, and we do it all alone.
Membership in a group of writers can’t make the work itself any less solitary, but it can eliminate some of the isolation that’s so much a part of the writer’s life. Being regularly in the company of other people who are trying to do essentially the same thing and having the same sort of problems doing it can be enormously helpful. It may even be essential.
In the past several years, much of my writing has been done at a writers’ colony. I’ve written before about the experience, and have told how the privacy and the respite from mundane tasks enables one to concentrate intently upon one’s work and get a prodigious amount accomplished. A factor, unquestionably, is that one is surrounded by fellow artists who are similarly engaged. Their presence has a definite energizing effect.
Typically, the writers and painters and composers at the colony don’t talk much about what they’re doing. An artist may open his studio toward the end of his stay so that his fellows can see what he’s done. A composer may give a recital, or a writer a reading. But these are not occasions for feedback. We serve one another as appreciative audience, not as critics.
The company of other writers is important, at a colony or back in the real world. A writers’ group can be extremely valuable even if no one ever brings in a manuscript, and even if nobody ever talks about writing. There is something special about being with other writers, whether the subject under discussion is baseball or botany or Byzantium.
In a writers’ group, it probably helps if the members are at a similar stage of development; otherwise people can get locked into roles. It may be desirable, too, if everybody’s working in the same general area of writing. But the most important thing is simply being in the company of one’s fellows. It’s one of the reasons we join organizations and attend conferences, one of the reasons we get together in the pages of this magazine. One way or another, we seem to need each other.