Critique Groups

Helpful, Harmful, or a Big Waste of Time?

When I finished my MFA in 1992, I joined a critique group with some of my fellow MFA-ers. The night a chunk of my novel was to be critiqued and a group member said, “I haven’t had to time to read this, but I think…” I decided that was the last workshop I would attend that I wasn’t paid for.

I have taught short fiction workshops at Marymount U. and have led zillions of writing workshops at the famous Writer’s Center, Bethesda, Maryland. I have also been busy writing and will have my 21st short story published in spring 2012 as well as my collection of short stories, Falling Women and Other Stories thanks to Shelfstealers! I have written several novels, which in turn found some well-known agents, who worked with me on these novels, but none of these books found a publisher. So I have never successfully gone long in my fiction writing, never had a novel published.

My MFA professor, the novelist Richard Bausch, used to say that you write a novel the way you live your life: alone. But the truth is I don’t live my life alone; it’s peopled by many. But he’s right about writing. It’s a lonely business, and maybe a critique group, which I’ve long avoided, could shed light on work created in the darkness.

So how do you find fellow writers for a critique group? Do these other writers need to be well-published? Or maybe more importantly do they need to be well read? Should they be writing in your genre? How many do you want in your group? What are the rules for the group?

In my writing workshops, I have guidelines. The first is that the writer can’t speak during the initial stage of the critique because the work must stand on its own, and that the other workshop participants must state what they heard from the writer’s reading of his work. Not what they think or like, just what they heard because this gets at the writer’s intention. I have more of these guidelines, which I will share later. But do these guidelines work for a critique group?

Tell me about your critique group experiences. Don’t be afraid to go negative! Maybe together we can come up with some critique group guidelines that might fit into Writers Sharing Their Epiphanies, the book on writing Shelfstealers is putting together. I want to hear from you.