How to form a writers' group.

My writers' group has been the best educational experience of my life. I won't give the name of the group, because we're on the edge of being victims of our own success. We have a simple game plan. Write, read, critique, and meet to do it face-to-face every week. Members bring their work in, pass out copies and read it aloud one-by-one. That's the procedure for fact, fiction or poetry. If it's a screenplay or stage script, the member assigns parts and has people read them aloud. A person can read or play out 2,000 words maximum. Then the rest of the writers can either give live critiques or write them (and any corrections) on the copies, which are also used to make minor corrections.

And I've been finishing 2,000 words every week. There were two weeks I took a vacation because the novel went off track and I was stressed-out over it. But I came back with the story straightened out and ready to progressed.

There are so many people in the group who are published now. One has an agent and his book was in negotiation to get published. 

We're the victims of our own success, though, because there are only so many people who can read in an evening. When attendance and participation get above sixteen, and the group has to sit from 6:30 to after 11 p.m., with many people exiting well before. We really can't accommodate any more members, yet, on occasion, more show up.

I give away our trade secret for other beginning writers to start their own writing groups on the same plan. The hardest thing about it, as we've found recently, is to find a venue in which to meet. You just hope that one of your members has a mansion in a central location, and doesn't mind sanitizing the bathroom after a dozen people use it every week. Bookstores are becoming dinosaurs, and those remaining are not very open to having a free, unpaid R&D department, which is really what a writers' group is to a bookstore. (Sounds like a foolish thing to turn down when I say it like that.)  Library conference rooms might be good, but we generally get out after an area library would close. Weekends aren't ideal, because for working people with families, those are usually taken up. Restaurants and cafes are too noisy unless they have their own back room that can be reserved.

If you're meeting in a public place, you have institute something like the “Iguana” rule, that is replace all swear words with “Iguana.” We have to meet in a restaurant once a month, and I had some brief passages there last week that I just didn't read, because they referred to things like oral sex. Not what you'd want to hear while eating, or if you do, you want to have in on an iPod with a headset.

That's the general, winning formula for how to make a great writers' group that  raises peoples' skill levels to professional.

There is another part of it, but it's usually thought of differently from our main group. We do have a once a month reading where we read over somebody's whole novel or script, and critique that. This gives the reader/reviewers the continuity that's lacking in short weekly readings. It also provides in-depth reviews.

All of this works only if people remember that there's more to critique than just cutting down somebody's work. Critiques need to be honest and specific,and done without attack. 

I've been to creative writing classes, but if you want to get good at writing, I suggest that this is the course to take. And depending on where you find the venue, you can do it on a shoe-string budget compared to a college course.