My Writers Group

My writer’s group is such a huge blessing. We meet every Tuesday, about ten to fourteen of us in a session. The group consists mainly of educated peoples, professors, lawyers, teachers and other professionals, often connected to the nearby University. We socialize for about the first twenty minutes, eating amazing desserts and hors-d’oeuvres. Some people seem to come mainly for the socializing.

Then we get down to the critiques. Every week we have two people submit their writing, up to ten pages, double spaced. The group downloads from our website and reads the submissions prior to coming to the meeting. We take the submissions one at a time, going around in circle, giving everyone a chance to comment.

Each critique almost always has positive and negative aspects. In two years I have only given one review that was all positive. The truth is that most of us are unpublished authors, in the traditional sense, with regards to what we actually want to write. There is much to critique usually, everything from logistical detail problems, to lack of emotion, to lack of details, to useless details, and the ever popular overuse of adverbs. We generally take about two and a half hours to go through the submissions.

Personally I have grown tremendously through the group. I have taken the good ideas I wrote about in my past and have re-written them, sometimes twice. I now have an eighty-six thousand word novel that I am about to edit. All of it I owe to the growth I have gained through my group. I have always been good at relaying emotion and getting into the heads of my characters. That skill has been honed to, when I am writing it, I can see the scene unfold in front of me. Everything else in the real world falls away.

So, praise God for my writing group!