The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Writers’ Groups

Once you’ve committed to the lonely life of a writer, you’ll scarcely get your first finger of cheap whiskey poured before someone tells you to join a writers’ group. Join a writers’ group! Great writers throughout the ages—from James Joyce to Langston Hughes to the guy who writes erotic novels about people boning dinosaurs, probably—have turned to their peers to hone their craft.

Unfortunately, no one really knows how to create an excellent writers’ group. Legendary groups like the Bloomsbury Group were born from a combination of luck and magic, and you’re probably not going to be able to replicate them with a rag-tag group of strangers you’ve rounded up on Discord. But with a few simple tips, you can achieve something much more interesting—namely, the most stunningly ineffective writers’ group this world has ever seen. 

1. Don’t set a regular meeting schedule. 

Meet when the vibes are right. Meet when the stars align over the high tide on a waxing gibbous moon. Meet on days when your feet carry you into the wilderness in search of connection and the winds whisper to seek companions in the written word. 

Meet on a random Tuesday and then like three and a half weeks later on a Friday for some reason. 

Consistency might be key for every other writer who has ever put pen to paper, but you’re special—you do your best work in random spurts every 47 days when you’ve run out of other ways to avoid loading the dishwasher. 

2. Deliver all critique with a “compliment dinner roll”. 

You’ve probably heard of the “compliment sandwich” method, where criticism is sandwiched between two compliments to make it less discouraging for the listener. For true dysfunction, however, you’ll want to turn to the “compliment dinner roll” method, where you deliver compliments all the way through, because you’re so non-confrontational that you can’t bear the thought of delivering mild criticism to a polite stranger who has directly asked for it. 

The less specific you can be, the better. The story was good, the characters were cool, and your favourite part was all of it. Take every critical insight and mush it up into a soft, digestible pablum that ensures no one ever has a strong feeling in your direction.

3. Don’t worry about genre. 

It’s hard to show up to meetings and have the work you’ve poured your heart into be picked apart. And with a bit of effort, you can make it so much harder by joining a group filled with genres you passionately hate. 

If you’ve always found fantasy a slog, just wait until you’ve signed yourself up to read 300,000 unedited words of the adventures of B’rl’kyr’thyr the Unpronounceable, pulled from a Dungeons & Dragons campaign the author participated in six years ago and only sort of remembers. And in turn, get ready for endless weeks of insisting that, yes, your detective romance novel absolutely does need to have a detective and romance in it. 

4. Defend yourself from feedback at all costs. 

Don’t think of your meetings as low-stakes sessions where writers genuinely try to help their peers improve. Instead, think of each meeting as a winner-take-all gladiator fight, where the only way to emerge with dreams unscathed is to block the stabs of constructive feedback with a shield of defensiveness, dismissiveness, and pedantry. 

Your prose is purple? Sorry, you forgot, your poetic soul can be a bit much for people who write with the lyricism of a washing machine owners’ manual. Your pacing is slow?  Weird, that’s not what Stephen King said when he crawled backwards out of your television set and personally blessed your manuscript. Your writing sample was just six consecutive pages of the letter R, almost like your cat fell asleep on the keyboard? Yeah, that’s how literary writing is supposed to be; of course you genre writers wouldn’t know that. 

5. Keep writing opportunities to yourself. 

Writing is a lonely life, and you can keep it that way by hoarding every contest, opportunity and industry connection like some sort of literary dragon. Do you know an agent friend who is dying to find a great YA dystopian nonlinear space opera set on Jupiter’s 3rd largest moon, exactly like the one your group member is writing? You do?

Keep it to yourself, because writing is a zero-sum game and the only way to succeed is to curl up ever-tighter on your hoard, lest the filthy hobbyists steal the submission deadline for the next edition of Taco Bell Quarterly. 

6. Make your stylistic preferences everyone’s problem.

Should you always use an Oxford comma? The only people who know the answer are the world’s greatest English teachers, the ghost of William Shakespeare and God. Oh, and every member of your writing group, after you turn your devotion to the Oxford comma into the basis of both your literary criticism and your general personality.

Insist that dialogue without quotation marks is the future of prose. Rave constantly about the merits of second person omniscient POV. Tell every writer you meet that their story will never work as a novel, and is clearly more suited to a series of one-act plays. Have fun with writing—just make sure no one else does.

7. Don’t be afraid to let in a little interpersonal drama.

You know what’s kind of boring? Writing all the time. You know what’s not boring? Starting drama for no reason. Tell everyone that Cindy only gives positive feedback to Leanne because they graduated from the same MFA program (in different years, but… still) until you’ve successfully turned your writers’ group into an interpersonal Hunger Games. 

After all, friendships between writers have always been tinged with suspicion. What if she’s cozying up to me to get close to my agent? What if he’s planning to rip off my work? What if she forgets all about me when she lands a book deal? It’s impossible to say how your relationship with your writing group members will turn out—unless you intentionally sabotage them with malicious rumors and wild accusations for no real material benefit at all. 

Happy writing!