writing groups

[tielan]

Day at work; ostensibly to print things, go through my mail, check my things, and work out how to delete my computer HD when i leave next week...

getyourwordsout is asking if people want to be put into 'encouragement groups' for our writing this year.

While my instinctive answer is 'yes', I'm well aware that I should be extremely wary of signing up to be randomly grouped with people that I'll be accountable to for an entire year, and with whom I may or may not have anything in common.

Technically, I have my real-world writing buddies, but that group's more social and less writing these days. The person who organised the write-ins went to Wales for a couple of years and is due back in May this year, and we've become more social, less writing over the last five years that we've all known each other.

The only woman who's really seriously writing is neck-deep in her original story, and she really likes talking about it, while I couldn't care less. Mostly, it's that she treats me like a couple of other friends who are DEEPLY ENGROSSED in her story (she posts chapters to them as she goes along - they're kind of like her alpha readers), while I am very casually involved. Her genre is YA fantasy, and while I like that, her stories are about family and dysfunction and the rush of sexual feelings and dramatic Pacific Northwest family feuds.

It's kind of what I imagine Twilight to be without the vampires and with sex. (Disclaimer: I have never read Twilight, so I don't actually know, but it sounds like that same slightly melodramatic young adult backdrop.)

I'm not sure what I want in a writing group, I guess. I'm bad at reading other people's fic, TBH, so I'm not good for feedback. I guess I want people to write with, and talk with about my fic, or my original ideas, and possibly to be accountable to...

IDEK.

Comments

[shorti]

I saw that reminder too and like you I immediately want to join. But I've been writing long enough now to know how hard it is to find a writing group that meets your needs. I've gone through about 3 since I started both in person and online and found that there's always a disconnect somewhere. Normally it's that some people are there for the more social aspect of a writing group when all I want to do is write. Other times its that what we're writing is do vastly different that we don't have enough interest/aren't well read enough in the genre to provide meaningful feedback. So I'm a bit wary to joining and committing myself to randoms who may be less committed because I know I'll be obsessive about giving productive feedback. It's a nice idea though! Hopefully some will find good partners from it.

[tielan]

It's the disconnect that worries me. I think I did Camp Nano a number of years ago, and got about 3 people barely out of their teens who wrote slash fiction and nothing else.

As you can probably imagine, that didn't end so well...

[shorti]

There's no way to filter by any criteria with writing groups either so that adds another layer of complexity. I once got paired with a lady who writes YA Sci Fi like I do but when I started reading her novel I knew from the second chapter that I would hate it. We clashed on everything but the protagonists name and I didn't even look at the critique she gave my novel but simple deleted it because I knew she wasn't anywhere close to the audience I wanted for my novel. So now if I ever come across a reliable writing partner I hang on for dear life!

[tielan]

This is probably especially true when even if you're writing the same kind of novels, you're not writing the same type of characters.

An fic about Bucky Barnes is going to be very different from one in the same vein about Maria.