The Power of the Group: How a Writing Group can Support, Inspire, and Sustain a Writer
The year was 2002. Michelle Kwan had a devastating fall in her long program at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, the Queen Mother died, and Michael Jackson briefly dangled his baby off a Berlin balcony. I was new to the city of Ottawa and didn’t know many people. In an effort to be more social, one wintery evening I found myself in a highschool classroom being taught how to critique writing as part of a continuing education program.
Our instructor was a grumpy short-story magazine editor who had little patience for fruity sentences, overblown descriptions or new writers’ fragile egos. She taught a motley group of government bureaucrats, teachers, retirees and archivists (me!) how to read one another’s work, how to find constructive things to say and how to give feedback more helpful than “I didn’t like it” or “it was boring.” While the class was excellent, what I enjoyed the most were the connections I made with a couple of fellow students. At the end of the semester I was thrilled to be approached by one of them and asked to join their own, separate critique group. Little did I know they had been evaluating both my critiquing and my personality over the class to see if I’d be a good fit.
That is how my writing career began and my life changed.
In the early days there were four to five of us. We met at one another’s homes roughly once a month. Every session one or two people would be featured for critique. Because email and attachments were still new, the critiquees were responsible for getting their physical pages to the critiquers ahead of the next meeting. This often meant having your pages ready a month before the actual meeting. It also introduced me to the thrill of some on-the-job stealth photocopying. Looking back on it, I can’t imagine I was ever capable of such forethought, organization or sneakiness.
No matter whose house we went to, some drinks and limited food would be provided. We all understood that these were not social visits. We were essentially strangers, getting together with like minded strangers to read, react and suggest improvements to our work. As all writers know, you never feel more vulnerable or exposed than when you show someone a new piece. It’s a testament to the group that we trusted one another with our clumsy first drafts and poorly conceived story ideas and that we did so again and again. I guess we got some good training in that Continuing Ed program!
Still, we all had to learn, and re-learn how to not take offense, react defensively or argue (too much) with one another. We had to hear what people were saying and be open to, as British writer Sir Arthur Quiller Couch has said, “murdering our darlings.” Being on the receiving end of a critique taught us to pay special attention if there was consensus in the group that a character wasn’t working, or a piece of dialogue was corny. Then we knew we had a problem.
We also became better critiques over the years. Because we have trust and history to lean on, we are honest and sometimes blunt with one another, but we are also careful to be constructive and when we identify an issue we try to brainstorm solutions.
This brainstorming is my favorite part of critiquing, and may be one of my favorite parts of writing. There is something exhilarating and creatively fulfilling about discussing a piece of writing with a group of people and coming up with different ways that a character could develop or a scene could unfold.
I had unsuccessfully pursued publication for a long time before Keylight Books (an imprint of Turner Publishing Company) took a chance on my latest novel. I would not have kept going over those years of rejection, discouragement and disappointment had it not been for my critiquing group. Not only did I have a band of like-minded people encouraging me, but the creative satisfaction I got in contributing to the improvement of their writing was immensely rewarding, and was enough to keep me writing.
The makeup of our group has changed a bit over the years, but we’ve evolved into four committed writers who get together roughly once a month over Google Meet. One person is in Europe, one is in northern Canada and two of us are in the same city, though even before the pandemic, we rarely saw one another. Some of us are published, some are still working on it, but the dynamic of our one to two hour meeting remains the same. A little bit of chit chat to start things off, then diving into someone’s pages… One member is detail-oriented and catches every missed semicolon, another is great at seeing the big beats of a story and another can catch bad dialogue or confusing sentences. After twenty years, we know one another’s styles, strengths and weaknesses. We have celebrated each other’s triumphs and failures and provided encouragement and feedback every step of the way.
I often think that in the normal run of my life—work, family, friends—I would never have met this disparate group of people. Despite our commitment to writing over socializing, with the passage of time we have become friends. We’ve eaten in one another’s homes, met new partners, pets and children and learned about one another’s professional lives. We did all of this slowly, over two decades of monthly meetings where we spent most of our time talking about character arcs and “head hopping.”
We were brought together by writing, and my writing, and my life, has been better for it.
—
Amy Tector is an archivist and novelist living in Ottawa, Canada. Her forthcoming book, The Honeybee Emeralds, features Alice, a shy intern at a Parisian magazine who just wants to succeed without causing a fuss. Discovering a stunning emerald necklace, she recruits three friends to uncover its glamorous history. They learn that it was owned by Napoleon III’s sauciest mistress, the spy Mata Hari and Jazz Age icon Josephine Baker. It will be published in March 2022.
Instagram: https://www.
THE HONEYBEE EMERALDS
Alice Ahmadi has never been certain of where she belongs.
When she discovers a famed emerald necklace while interning at a struggling Parisian magazine, she is plunged into a glittering world of diamonds and emeralds, courtesans and spies, and the long-buried secrets surrounding the necklace and its glamorous former owners.
When Alice realizes the mysterious Honeybee Emeralds could be her chance to save the magazine, she recruits her friends Lily and Daphne to form the “Fellowship of the Necklace.” Together, they set out to uncover the romantic history of the gems. Through diaries, letters, and investigations through the winding streets and iconic historic landmarks of Paris, the trio begins to unravel more than just the secrets of the necklace’s obsolete past. Along the way, Lily and Daphne’s relationships are challenged, tempered, and changed. Lily faces her long-standing attraction to a friend, who has achieved the writing success that eluded her. Daphne confronts her failing relationship with her husband, while also facing simmering problems in her friendship with Lily. And, at last, Alice finds her place in the world―although one mystery still remains: how did the Honeybee Emeralds go from the neck of American singer Josephine Baker during the Roaring Twenties to the basement of a Parisian magazine?
BUY HERE
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips
Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
