Writing groups and other people’s opinions

In an earlier post, I discussed writing as a solitary craft as opposed to a social venture. Let us have a look at a few ways that writing can be used when others are involved.

I’d like to thank my readers for playing along with the 140 characters challenge. Some of the pitches were absolutely stunning! If you want to read even more great pitches, please visit Write Your Own Story. I was thrilled that she spread the word on her blog and got her readers to participate.
I think that one of the things I like most about blogging is exactly this kind of thing. Interacting, getting to know other writers (and readers), being able to share experiences and getting inspired. Blogs are a great way to share writing prompts and challenges. I’m getting increasingly glad that I finally caved in and made a blog.

On this side of the screen, I am in two writing groups. One has been in existence for several years and meets weekly or biweekly, while the other is a looser (not loser!) group of NaNoWriMo writers in my local area.
A while ago, The Empty Pen discussed writing groups and bringing a piece for critique and because I thought it really interesting to read how other groups work, I thought I’d share what my groups do.

In the first writing group, we are six regular members. A couple of days before our meetings, one of us puts up a short piece (max 2,000 words) on our intern website. The others then read it and prepare a critique for the next meeting. Sometimes it’s a complete short story, but very often it’s a chapter or a scene from a novel project. What the six of us have in common is writing and reading and an age group spanning just about a decade. We have different backgrounds (though all of us are somewhat bookish) and tastes in literature. I find it nice to get different points of view on what I write, and now that we have been doing it for a while, I often know what kind of response to expect from the various members. We all have our little pet peeves or key issues.
After we have discussed the text, the writer of it gets to decide a challenge or writing prompt for everybody. This can be anything. We’ve had to write a colour, draw a random genre out of a hat, do “what if” scenarios with characters from our novel projects, write a scene based on a quote from a book, write a story only in dialogue and so on. Basically a bit of everything. Usually we read our take on each challenge out loud for the others to hear and comment.
Eaach year in December we do a crossover story where we “donate” a couple of characters each and then take turns in writing an episode. Our poor characters have been through a lot (including hitting Santa Claus with a car and saving the world from zombie elves).

The NaNoWriMo group I only joined this year. We only meet every second month. A few of us sometimes get together more often for a write-in. We don’t do a lot of organised critiques or writing prompts, but at the moment we are writing two collaborative stories. We are five people doing one of them (two chapters each). Unfortunately I can’t reveal the concept now, but we are working from a certain set of key words that have been predetermined for each chapter and will decide where the story goes. The other is a chain writing experiment where one person writes 500 words, sends it on to the next who then writes 500 words and sends only those 500 on to the next person and so on. I’m sure that will take us somewhere funny.

If any of you have experiences with writing groups, please share how you go about it. Do you do writing prompts? Comment each other’s stories? How about critique groups online? (I haven’t really tried that, but I’d like to hear how they work.)

Finally, please allow me a moment of plugging. My story, Treasure, is going live on Every Day Fiction on the 26^th of April. Right around the corner. (I’m slightly anxious to see what people think of it.) I hope some of you will take a moment to read it.