Critique Group Advice – Part 1

Our critique group met last night, which is always a highlight of our writing life. Firstly because our fellow writer friends are awesome, and secondly because it’s fascinating to find out what your words do inside other people’s heads.

If you don’t have a group, get one.

There are lots of ways to run a critique group, and our way isn’t the only proper way. But we can offer a bit of advice based on our experiences.

Give it focus. For us this means we tell all prospective members up front that we only critique fiction. Not poetry, not self-help, not cookbooks, not screenplays, not… Just fiction. This isn’t our snobbery showing through (we keep it buttoned up a little better than that). We just realize that we, personally, couldn’t offer top-notch feedback to poets. It would come down to simply whether we liked or disliked each piece, and that’s not very valuable. You could get even more focused and limit your group to a single genre, or to novel-length works, or short stories, only. How restricted your focus is will depend somewhat on the size of your local writing community, and how many members you’d like your group to have. In our experience it works best to have about 5 or 6 members. More than that and it’s hard for everyone to have a chance to give in-depth feedback. Fewer than that and meetings tend to fall apart if even one person needs to miss a week.

Should you meet weekly? Bi-weekly? Monthly? That’s up to you and your group. The important thing is to have a schedule. Everyone can mark their calendars and arrange their lives around your meetings. Plus, a set schedule motivates you to keep working.

Set ground rules. For instance, treat each other’s work as confidential; critique the writing, not the author’s beliefs; keep things constructive and encouraging, but don’t pull your punches about problems you see in the text. Spell out these group expectations. It might feel a little formal, but trust us when we tell you that it’s important. (If you get awesome members, none of it will ever be an issue. But you still need to all be on the same page about how the group operates.)

We’ll talk in more depth about some of those guidelines, and other critique group lessons we’ve learned through the years next time. If you have advice to share, pop it in the comments!