Last night a friend brought by his critique of my first novel beta read. He has excellent insights and a quick mind. He liked my book. Ha… I knew I liked him for a good reason. I'll call him Ralph for the sake of privacy.
Ralph is a relatively new member to the local writing group. I joined the group a little over three years ago. We talked for several hours about our work. I appreciated his coming by as I'm still recovering from surgery and haven't been able to attend my group meetings for the past six weeks.
Frankly, I was a bit surprised to see Ralph with my book. He hadn't been to a meeting for several months, and that isn't surprising as people come and go. They try us out and disappear. They come for a few months and disappear, some forever and some pop back up from time to time. I told him I had missed him at the meeting because his input has always been well spoken.
Ralph said he was working on his book and wanted to submit it for beta read when he finished it. Then he asked me, how much of a contribution would I ascribe to the group for the completion of my novel. I told him that the book I wrote wouldn't have been the book it is. That it would have been relegated to the heaping pile of horrible first novels that everyone says has to be thrown away. He was surprised to hear that with his thinking I was just that good. Don't I wish.
Local writers groups are priceless for many reasons as I see it. Here are a few:
1. A writing group is suitable for any level of writing skill. There are several in my group that have two or three books completed and are shopping for agents. There is one published author. We have beginners and advanced writers. We have pantsers and plotters. We have grammar police people and not so much so.
2. Having an advanced college degree does not necessarily a writer make. Hey, in the business world with a few exceptions, it's a truncated communications foray. Writing, especially in the world of email and memos, writing based on substance and way less so on the way it's written. I never had a boss send back a memo with red ink on it and tell me as soon as I clean up the commas, sentence fragments, and sentence splices, I can have the money for the parts needed to move the assembly line along. I'm not saying we shouldn't write clearly. We just write abbreviated.
When we get into a writers group. Oh my gosh, are bad habits hard to break. The writing group members, in a loving way, will let you know just what those bad writing habits are. And some people will tell you in no uncertain terms what to do to correct yourself. Thank goodness, I'm an old retired Navy Chief with a skin of barnacles when I presented my first short story to them. I had no idea that I had written such a great story so poorly.
3. Friendships are made. It can't be helped. Even with seeing each other once or twice a month we become close having writing as our baseline. We all write in different genres and even going through the critiquing process for material we'd usually never read gives us an appreciation of other styles.
Okay, people are people. Not everyone has a smooth presentation of their critique and could be a bit hurtful. Well - okay, some have been. Some people lose sight of the story and lay on the writer the onus of what was written. Generally, it's a ground rule that we critique the work and not the writer. I was asked not to come back to a group because I used the N-word for Black-Americans in my book set in 1936 and I only used it once in context. I was in two writers groups. The writers group that asked me not to come back had an average age a couple decades below the other group I've been in for three years. That's okay though, Spring came and they all melted.
We have had members suffer heart attacks (not because of critiques, I don't think), strokes, cancer, and deaths of family members. We've visited them in the hospital, taken casseroles to their homes and otherwise done what we could to extend comfort to them. Why? Because we are all friends.
4. To the meat of writers groups for good writing. Many eyes. I've moved chapters around because of the input from the group that I didn't see. I've changed POV's, fixed timelines and plot holes that I didn't notice. I've added story elements that I didn't think of, all because of the input from the writers group. No man or woman is an island - somebody said something like that. I added woman for modern day political correctness. Point is, my book is a product of synergy that came about from the writers group that I could never have accomplished on my own.
After relaying these thoughts to Ralph, he is rethinking his attendance. We all want to put out a readable and enjoyable writing people will like. I recommend joining a local writers group regardless of your writing skill level.
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