writing groups

My writing space is full of old notebooks as well as lots of books that I think might be useful one day, but don’t ever read. I just can’t throw stuff awaay. Until very recently I belonged to a writing group. It was one of the (seemingly) last postal writing groups in the UK. It would take anything up to twelve weeks to get the package back again, in which time you’d have moved on and written other stuff and the piece you were so eager to get feedback on was either finished and sent off somewhere, or you’d decided that it was a pile of rubbish anyway. But somehow belonging to this group was a comfortable thing. You’d enjoy tunneling through the others’ drafts of work and thinking of ways it could be improved. And you’d appreciate the rather delayed comments about your own work too. Some of the people in the group were good at criticizing.
But gradually over the years the writers in the group whose work you most admired dropped out. Eventually the remaining people in the group seemed only to be interested in telling each other where they went on holiday and what they’d been doing in their garden. NO mention of books or reading. The comments you’d receive back on your work were sometimes one line from some of the members. They’d say things like, ‘I don’t understand this so I can’t comment’. Or, ‘You certainly have kept me interested. Looking forward to more.’
And I kept all these bits of paper. Five years’ worth of comments. The other day I went through it all and I couldn’t find one piece of paper I thought would be worth keeping. Even from the time when there were good people in the group.
And the lesson I have learned very slowly is that you have to be your own best critic. You can’t rely on anyone else. Putting stuff away and letting it fester for a few weeks or even months is just about the best thing you can do. You’ll know when you’ve finished with a thing. It will either feel right or it will scream ‘UNSALVAGEABLE’ in day-glow yellow at you.
Belonging to a writing group, whether it’s by post or online, isn’t just as simple as getting feedback though. I think when I joined my ill-fated writing group I was keen to assert myself as a writer in some small way. To have a captive audience. To know that my stuff was being read by another human being. And it’s different when it’s a stranger. Giving your writing to your family and close friends is a recipe for disaster. They’ll want to say the right thing and not offend you. You’ll suspect them of doing just that and grumpiness will erupt. But to have a real audience you have to just get your stuff out there. Send it to the right magazines. Send it to competitions. And if it’s a novel, send it to literary agents when you are sure it’s the best it can be. And in the meantime, while you wait for those inevitable rejection slips, read books. Read copiously. Read widely. Read stuff that gets a bad review in the papers. Read the one that didn’t win the Man Booker. Or the Orange. Read everything you can. Read short stories and novels and poetry. Read before you go to sleep and read on the loo. Read a book in the doctor’s waiting room, and shun those crappy magazines. Because if you don’t read, you can’t be a writer. Nothing, as they say, is created in isolation; but that doesn’t mean you have to be a member of a writing group.
NaNoWriMo is different. It’s about us all trying to get a novel written in a month, and you don’t have to upload an extract from your first draft if you don’t want to.