Writers Groups, Worth It?

My idea  of the perfect writers group.

Ask authors about writers groups, and you're likely to get some strong opinions. Some people swear by them, some people swear at them.

Personally, I love them. And, I especially love critique groups.

Over the past twenty years, I've been in at least nine from North Carolina to Pennsylvania to Las Vegas. There's no better place for a beginning writer to improve their knowledge - notice, I said knowledge, not skill.

Skill comes from doing. It comes from writing everyday, even if you're just writing curmudgeonly blog posts like me.

But, knowledge, such as "What the heck is an Oxford comma?" That's something you can learn from a writers group.

Most critique groups follow a similar format. At each meeting, a few members are scheduled to present their work. The author is expected to provide copies in advance for the other members to read and comment on, and, usually, the author reads their work in front of the group and each member has the opportunity to provide feedback.

I'm a big fan of reading aloud - many sentences look perfectly fine on paper, but sound like monkey dirt when vocalized.

So, what do you get from opening yourself up to criticism? Plenty. For fifteen minutes, you get a captive audience for your work. You can tell by the grimaces, groans, giggles, and gasps if what you're doing is working. Hopefully, these will occur in the spots you want, and not in places you don't.

For myself, I know I've done my job if people mumble, "You're one sick puppy, Tony." For horror, that's the reaction you want.

For romance, it probably means you need to re-work.

The word 'critique' scares a lot of people. The prospect of being ridiculed by a group can be terrifying.

In twenty years, I've never seen anyone ridiculed. People make suggestions, and they'll point out glaring mistakes.

My friend P.T. McHugh nailed me on a sentence I wrote: "The setting sun set the blue horizon ablaze." Setting...sun...set - I swear, I never saw it until P.T. pointed it out. Frightening.

Of course, the next week I got P.T. on a section of his novel where he had a Catholic mission serving meat loaf on Friday.

Friday? Make it fishsticks, P.T.

People are not mean in writers groups. The old adage about an armed society being a polite society holds especially true in critique - because, sooner or later, everybody reads.

I get a lot from the feedback I receive in writers groups. Do I follow it all? No, but I follow quite a bit of it.

But, I have a confession - the main reason I go to writers groups is research.

Writers must do three things to stay relevant: they have to write, they have to read, and they have to *observe*.

It's all part of "writing what you know." At the beginning of the year, I wrote a book called Vales Hollow. The main character, although I swear she didn't start out as the lead, is a sixty-three year old ex-CIA assassin named Janey Smith. She's brash, she's sociopathic, and she steals the scene every time.

Now, I'm not a CIA assassin who was in Saigon when the US pulled out. How did I write Janey and make her believable?

I was in a writers group in Las Vegas about ten years ago. Three people in that group were writing about their experiences during the Viet Nam war.

The first was a craps dealer in Vegas who had been in the Navy stationed near Saigon. He was writing memoirs about his last days in Saigon - it was very well written, and I hope he went on to be published. His words put you in Saigon during those last days, and I've never forgotten the sense of foreboding in his prose.

The second two were a husband and wife who had been in the CIA up through the late 60s. He was in poor health, and she was writing their memoirs. They were a little bit James Bond and Moneypenny, a little Maxwell Smart and 99 - my wife, Laurie, and I were mesmerized by their stories. They never admitted to having actually been spies, but they talked about the spy business with a twinkle of mirth in their eyes. Yeah, we thought they were spies.

When I started populating Vales Hollow with characters, Janey Smith dropped down out of the rafters with her handy stiletto and sniper rifle. She told me a story about how she turned a flamethrower on the file cabinets of CIA headquarters in Saigon before catching the last helicopter out.

Our characters are conglomerations and extrapolations of people we have known. That's what makes them true, and truth is what we're after. Janey only worked because she felt like a real person.

Would I have come up with Janey Smith without those three wonderful people in Vegas? Probably, but she wouldn't have had the same depth. You can only get that from experience or from observation, and writers groups are great for observation.

From my perspective, you can't go wrong with a writers group. Whether you're looking for help, looking for feedback, or looking for characters.