How Do You Form—and Run—a Great Writers’ Group?

I talked last week about why you need a writers’ group—to have a group of people who will read your work and tell you what doesn’t work in it, the goal being to make that script the best it can be before the world sees it.

But how do you form one?

If you’re freshly out of school, you probably have a built-in group of people to choose from. I know a group in L.A. who will only take members who’ve had a certain writing professor in college, they so believe in that professor’s method. And finding people you’ve been in classes with is probably the easiest way.

If you don’t have a group of people to choose from based on a shared school, you’ll need to find like-minded people elsewhere. And given the world we live in, they don’t even have to be in your town. But your local community may be a place to start. Writing centers are established in so many cities—Boston has Grub Street, Seattle has Hugo House… Google “writing center near me” and see what you find. You can check with libraries, they might have a group at the library or know of groups that use the library for meetings.

One way to meet other writers is to take a writing class at a local college or online. One of the nice things about this is being able to scope out the writing of your fellow students and see whose work you respect and who, therefore, might be a good person for your writers’ group.

Once you get your group together, the MOST IMPORTANT THING is to talk about how you’re going to give feedback. Make a list of feedback guidelines to help people remember how to share their feedback. Make sure everyone understands the importance of following those guidelines. Things that should make your list:

• • Be honest about how the writing strikes you
• • Don’t worry about hurting anyone’s feelings
• • Be specific about what you feel needs to be improved
• • Avoid broad generalities: comments like “really loved it” aren’t helpful

Bottom line, when that agent or studio exec has your script in hand, the last thing that they’d worry about is hurting your feelings. They don’t know you or care about you—they just want to know if this script will make them money… is it good enough?

And that’s why you need a writer’s group—to make sure your work is good enough. After all, you want to fix all the problems BEFORE that script gets to an important reader, right? So having people who will honestly tell you what they think is the beginning of that happening.

Next week, more about feedback and how it can help your script to be as good as it can be.

Copyright © Diane Lake

17Jan21

Email Diane a question to Diane@DianeLake.com