How to start (and keep) a writers group

Starting or joining a writing group is one of the best things you can do for your writing practice. It gives you a recurring goal, improves your writing over time, and gives you a group of people who can support you and who you can support in turn.

If you are looking to start your own group, for whatever reason, these are my notes on what I would do today. They are based on Starlings Writers, the group I run in Brooklyn with Lancelot Schaubert. Starting with just three of us, the group still meets on the second and fourth Saturdays of the month close to ten years later, and has dozens of active in-person members and over 150 members online. 

What is a writers group? It is any meeting of writers to discuss their writing. You can read your work aloud and do critique, use it as dedicated writing time, work through a writing book together. A writer’s group is whatever you want it to be. If you want to focus on critique, go for it, just know that there are as many ways to do a writing group as groups that exist. Do what works best for you, right now, not what you think you should be doing. 

Before you begin:

1. Find at least one other person you’d like to work with. 

• Online or in person doesn’t matter, but you do need at least one other person to be a group. This is either the hardest or easiest part depending on your personality. 

2. Start with a session zero 

• This is a concept that comes from the table top role playing world. It is basically a nicer name for a planning session. Plan a meeting knowing that you will start by discussing how the group will operate. A meeting about future meetings. Really. Even (especially) if you are all besties. It is incredibly helpful for everyone to be on the same page with how the group will work, what will happen at each session, and how you will communicate about future sessions. 

During your session zero: 

3. Find a recurring time and place that works for everyone

Something like “the second Saturday of the month at this specific coffee shop”. I recommend somewhere public like a coffee shop or library. 

• The recurring part is very important. If you need to skip a week (holidays happen) everyone already knows when the next meeting is. There’s no need to have a whole long conversation about it. Just meet again on the next recurring date. 
• Public space is important because you are going to want to recruit people. And it's way easier to get people to show up somewhere public. Coffee and food are a plus. Try to get it central or easy for people to get to.

4. Decide how your group will operate.

Write it down as you decide.

• Are you doing critique of written work? Working through a writing book? Just meeting up to write? Any combo or something else entirely? Make it clear to your group. A lot of the rest of this list is about setting boundaries for a critique group, because that’s what I get the most questions on, but do what works best for your own group and feel free to change it up if it’s not working for you.
• What types of work are allowed? Our group's rule is unpublished, new works only. Because getting critique of a published work is wasting everyone's time. But we allow any genre, hell we've listened to podcasts and operas. You can learn a hell of a lot from working outside your comfort zone. 
• Discuss if “adult” works are allowed. In fact, you may want to have a full “lines and veils” discussion on what topics everyone is comfortable with. The same people who might be happy to listen to a smexy scene on a discord channel might blush to read it aloud at the library. 
• Read aloud or read-ahead? If your group is doing critique, will you send the works ahead of time, or read aloud during the group?  At Starlings we read aloud because nobody ever does the reading ahead of time. Maybe your group is different. 
• How much work at each meeting? We say we’ll read for 10 minutes which works out to about 1,500 words. 
• How often will you meet? Every second and fourth Saturday. Same time, same place. 
• How will your group communicate? We use discord. 
• Who organizes things? You might want some officers. A timekeeper. A calendar person. A rotating snack bringer. That one person who always brings the surge protector.
• When will you take breaks? Both during the session (eg. after every four readers) and during the year (established holidays, a summer month off). 
• Give yourselves a cool name. You're a group now. 

4. Do the thing 

• Whatever you’ve decided on. Execute the plan. Show up, do the thing. Then do it again. Keep showing up. If you miss a session, the next one is already on the schedule.

5. Recruit more people than you're comfortable with.

Friends. Friends of friends. Strangers you met in the bookstore. 

• Bigger groups decrease the likelihood of breakups due to attrition. People will drop out. People will come three times and never come back. People will need to take breaks. Keep recruiting until it sticks at a size you feel is right. Empower everyone in the group to invite people. Lance’s favorite saying is “bring 10 friends”
• If you somehow end up with too many people for your space or to critique in your designated time, split into two groups. Congrats 🎉, you've reached critical mass. Celebrate and keep going. 
• Maybe next week you'll only have three people. Life is like that. Don't despair. Keep showing up. Groups ebb and flow like the tide and your job is to welcome fish and anchors alike. 
• People are 10x more likely to actually show up if you are meeting in a public space. You can give people directions to the library or a coffee shop and it’s not too weird. 
• Practice your pitch. Oh, you like books? Do you write? You want to though, right? We're in a writers group looking for new members. We meet on the second and fourth Saturday of the month at the big table at the front of the library at 10am. You don't need to bring any writing, just come and listen the first time. Oh if you can't come this time, there's always next time, we’ll be there. 

6. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

But don't take any shit. 

• Talk more about your writing. Practice saying to friends and family “I can't make it then, I have my writers group.” Over time the more you mention it, the more they will remember you’re not available. 
• Reading work aloud in public can be terrifying. At Starlings we ask new folks to just bring themselves the first time, no need to bring writing. They are welcome to just come and listen - this massively reduces the barrier to entry (still pretty high) and lets them feel out if they like us. 
• Have an open door policy. Let people come and go as they need to both during the session and to the sessions themselves. This helps with comfort (tea and coffee are both diuretic!) and with people’s lives. People are more likely to come often if they can be late occasionally, or leave early when they need to. 
• Make sure new people are clear and agree to the boundaries and setup decisions you made in your session zero. If something is not working, have a group discussion, or even another session zero and make a change. It might take several iterations until the group has a good working system established. What that means will be different for every group, do what works for you.
• Your group has established boundaries and you should stick to them. If anyone makes the group, or a member of the group, uncomfortable, make that clear, and if they keep making it weird, uncomfortable, or unsafe. Uninvite them. Be clear and be firm. 
• If you are meeting on discord or another electronic platform, make sure you know who has the admin rights to kick someone out, and make sure you know how to use them in advance. 
• Be willing to listen, but stick to your established boundaries. If someone is pushing, you can say “If you’d like to change the way this group works we need to put another session zero on the calendar. This is not that time, so for now we will stick with the rules we have established.” 

7. Keep showing up and doing the thing.

And keep it fresh. 

• Be consistent. It might take a year or three to reach critical mass, the point where the event happens even if you yourself have to miss a meeting or two. It’s ok if it only lasts a year. Try again with a different group. 
• Keep yourselves motivated. Set group challenges and change things up once and a while. Read a writing book together. Meet someplace fun once a season or so (Pirate brunch! the Poetry festival! Cherry blossom meetup). Set Big Hairy Audacious Goals. 
• Build small rituals. Celebrate failures and achievements as a group. Who can get the most rejections in a year? Have a party when someone gets published. Write to a theme once a year. 
• Practice rose, bud, thorn. Rose: One thing that’s going well. Bud: One thing that’s hopeful or just starting out. Thorn: Something that isn’t going well or failing. 

Some additional notes on critique groups:

• I strenuously do not recommend using the “the author must be silent rule” found in Le Guin's Steering the Craft and other books- this is a legacy of the Milford method and can turn your group caustic because there is no boundary on what the person doing the critique can say, and it almost always feels terrible for the writer being critiqued. 
• At Starlings we use a timer. Someone reads for 10 minutes and then we critique for 10 minutes, discussion style. The timekeeper is also a moderator who moves the conversation along if a single person is talking too much.
• We also use a rule of “No disclaimers before reading” - this is not “do not explain the background or add context” but it is “we don't need to hear your life story, that the work is new, or that you wrote it 20 minutes ago.” It is intended to foster a playful space where people can bring work that is not ready for primetime without needing to feel defensive of their work. Another soft rule, if you’re not having fun, it’s not worth doing.

If you have any questions, I’m happy to answer them in the comments below. And if you found this helpful, please share it with a friend (or better yet, use it to start your own writing group!)

P.S. If you'd like to check out Starlings co-founder Lancelot Schaubert's work he's here (go read his recent interview with Elizabeth Bear or his serialized photonovel Cold Brewed).