When I attended my first meeting, everyone was very cordial and good-natured. Then the readings began. I remained silent during the first reading or two in order to assess the tone of the critiques. Right away, I noticed very little of substance was being offered. They just moved on to the next reader. I made a comment or two on the next couple of readers, and my comments were considerably more pointed than the ones that preceded them.

I looked around the room. These were intelligent people, artistically-oriented, and yet they couldn’t seem to find anything to say in the way of critique. I compared this to my experiences with the Henderson Writers Group in Las Vegas, where I was a member for three years before I moved back to Key West. The criticisms were far more worthwhile there, more insightful, and covered a wider variety of writing problems.

Then it hit me. The Henderson Writers Group used handouts. Each reader passed out copies of what he/she would be reading to the other members. Everyone read along, marked up the handed-out copies, then offered oral critique at the end of the read.

It became obvious to me that handouts were simply never on the radar of the Key West Writers Guild. Maybe people didn’t want to use the ink or the paper or whatever, but for some reason, handouts just weren’t considered. Their importance, however, cannot be overstated.

Spotting typos, paragraph errors, grammatical mistakes, and all the rest of it is a substantive part of the critiquing process. It’s not all listening for dialogue tags and POV shifts. Sometimes a word choice won’t look right on the page, but might slide right by you if you’re only listening. When a member can read along with the reader, then he/she is much closer to the material. Even larger things like story structure are more noticeable on the printed page. After all, a book is meant to be read, not read aloud.

You can hear people saying now, “But I always have a lot of typos in my writing. I can clean them up later,” or, “I’m not very good at spelling.” Well, you know what? They’ll have to address these problems if they want to become writers. The problems won’t go away by themselves, but they can be fixed by sharp-eyed critique groups, and then perhaps the writer won’t make those same mistakes over and over.

At that first KWWG meeting, I suggested everyone bring handouts next time. No one wanted to do it. Someone said the way to go was emailing the chapters in advance of the meeting. This would supposedly allow the members to look at the piece several days in advance and pore over it, giving it due attention. This is not the answer. You don’t know whom to send it to, you don’t know who’s going to show up at the next meeting, there’s no guarantee that they’ll read it, and worst of all, they’ll probably show up with no printed material of your chapter. Handouts on the spot are the way to go. They cover the members in attendance and force them to look at the writing.

Ink and paper may be an issue for some people, but they’ll have to get over it. The objective here is to become a better writer and they have to ask themselves if they really want it. If they do, then they’ll have to suck it up and use the ink and paper. It’s not easy, it really isn’t, and it might cost a little money. But it has to be done. I learned how to print on both sides of the page, cutting my paper use in half.

If people are serious about becoming better writers, they should overcome this resistance to printing up handouts for their writers groups. They’ll be surprised how much better of a writer they’ll become simply by knowing other people are going to be reading it along with them. Now, I’m aware that some groups might have as many as 30 or 40 people in attendance at each meeting. Printing up that many copies might be counterproductive, but you can spot who the real editors are in your group. Print up 10 or 15 copies and pass them out to those who are really going to offer good critique.

I’ve seen over the last three years as a member of the Henderson Writers Group exactly how much better a writer I have become. My novel The Take, which is published by a royalty publisher, was critiqued by this group, chapter by chapter. And I can easily say that the novel was transformed into a publishable state largely through the efforts of the other members of this group. In return, I gave them a big nod on the acknowledgement page. I can also say that the three novels I’ve written subsequent to The Take are better novels because of critiques.

One final thing. Critiquing via handouts sharpens your critiquing skills. I became a better writer not just because my novel was critiqued, but also because I critiqued other people’s work via their handouts. I could see in front of me the mistakes they were making and how, in many cases, I was making those same mistakes.

Writers groups are an invitation to become a better writer, no matter who you are. I strongly recommend them. Like the rest of writing, it’s really just a question of applying discipline.

And discipline is doing what you don’t want to do when you don’t want to do it.

I want to write about writers groups.  Critique groups, specifically.  I am a big believer in them.  And it doesn’t matter what kind of writers are in a particular critique group.  If you join, you will become a better writer.  That’s all there is to it.

There are very small critique groups, limiting their membership to maybe three or four people, and then the size escalates from there.  In the small groups, each member may get up and read, then listen to the criticism of his fellow members.  Or each member may distribute a copy of his read to the others who take it home, examine it, mark it up, then deliver their critiques at the next meeting.

In the larger groups, the piece is almost always read aloud by the writer to the other members, who then critique it on the spot.

I’m currently a member of four writers groups here in Las Vegas, two of which are critique groups. They are:  the local chapter of Sisters In Crime, the Las Vegas Writers Group, the Henderson Writers Group, and an as-yet unnamed crew.  The Henderson Writers Group (one of the critique outfits) usually attracts 20-30 people to each meeting.  The writers are a mixed bag, writing in all genres, published and unpublished.

These last few weeks, I’ve been reading a chapter a week of my latest novel to this group.  Prior to these reads, I had gone over that novel countless times, looking for ways to make it better, adding stuff here, deleting stuff there, moving other stuff around, fixing typos, and so on.  I thought it was pretty close to right when I brought chapter one in to read.

Well, the critiques I received were things which I hadn’t seen in all the times I’d been over that book, and you know what?  I never would’ve seen them. They were things that, for some reason, my brain was not geared toward spotting.  Some of these things were obvious to everyone but me, while some were extremely subtle…moving a phrase from the end of a paragraph to the beginning, for example.  Either way, they’d escaped my attention altogether.  That’s the beauty of these groups.  All those other eyes and ears, backed up by brains different from mine, can and will see stuff which I could never catch.

And it goes without saying (although I will say it) that my novel is much better because of the critiques I received from this group.

Memo to all writers, published and unpublished:  If you want to improve your WIP, and ultimately your writing itself, join a local writers group.  They’re everywhere! They’re everywhere!