Perhaps you’ve become-or have always been-the group’s scheduler and taskmaster.
Even great groups can develop unhealthy habits. Part of you believes a real writer would tough it out, but these lengthy submissions are chipping away at both your creativity and time to generate new material.4. Then there was that time you almost wrote I really hate you on a forty-five-page first draft. Sometimes the internal pressure feels so intense you avoid your inbox on submission day. A recent promotion has whittled your writing life down to a few precious hours, turning this commitment into a burden. Sometimes priorities shift.Īt first, the biweekly critique group that allowed forty-page submissions made you feel so alive. Do you stick with the writers you know or seek the right audience for your work?3. When a poetry group invites you to join, you feel torn between your growth and your friendships. Your memoir friends are scene-writing whizzes, but they know nothing about line breaks or meter. Or maybe you’re in a memoir group and recently turned to poetry. Cheers about your fantastic worldbuilding have morphed into beady-eyed glares at the three-horned, navel-gazing beast who dares to write about herself. Maybe you’ve spent the past three years in a speculative fiction group, but now you’re working on a memoir. It’s possible your interests have changed. At times, you might resent the basicness of the feedback given to you.2. Signals you’ve outgrown your group include feeling a need to catch everyone up on a missing skill and craving more sophisticated critiques. Sometimes one critique group member leaps ahead of the others, either because they’ve studied harder or written more. But the other four have nothing to do with writer temperament or the stage of your work in progress.1. The question isn’t whether to leave, but how.Īs a workshop aficionado and writing coach, I’ve discovered five reasons groups stop serving writers. That means leaving is a normal and healthy part of the workshop cycle. Most writing-group relationships fall in the season or reason category. Only a monster would desert them.Ī wise woman once told me some relationships are for a season, some for a reason, but only a few are for a lifetime. But this time, you love the people in your writing group. In retrospect, you can’t believe you stayed for so long. Ghosting those groups felt easy and justified. You’ve largely blocked out that library-sponsored writing group that turned into a one-woman therapy session, and the one that quickly became a coffee klatch. You’ve left groups before, like the one with Douchebag Ken who mansplained all the things you didn’t get in his latest draft and Humblebrag Kate, who lorded her latest “Oh it was nothing” publication right before tearing your manuscript to shreds. On others, you dream up elaborate escape plans.ĭeep in your marrow you know the truth: it’s time to leave your writing group. Some days, you feel like the world’s biggest jerk. Your anxiety has gotten so bad, you’ve “forgotten” a few submission dates or had “unavoidable scheduling conflicts” with Netflix or your dog.
You skim workshop submissions and check out of group discussions. Your fists clench on workshop day, your jaw tightens before every critique. You’ve been avoiding this for so long, but the problem is now unavoidable. Today’s guest post is by editor and coach Lisa Cooper Ellison ( who is teaching a class this month on Build Better Critique Groups.
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