I thought long and hard about whether or not I should make my first post this nice little welcome/intro/about me post. Then I thought, “No, that’s why I spent the last hour editing and tweaking the ‘about me’ section,” so better to dive right into what’s going on today in my writing life.

I have my first meeting today with a new writer’s group that I was invited to join when I attended The Writer’s Institute in May. It’s a newly-formed group, with four fiction writers total, all of whom have joined other groups in the past that later fizzled out. I’m trying to figure out why this is such a common occurrence with writer’s groups and hoping that it won’t happen again. The last workshop I joined was full of excellent writers, but we just couldn’t get our schedules to coincide. The one before that had a couple of members who didn’t take (constructive) criticism very well. Still another one had writers who just weren’t writing; after a few meetings, they’d run out of work to submit.

Still, I have high hopes for this group. Since we’ve all been in groups that didn’t work out, we have the common goal of keeping this one going. In order to do that we’ve established some guidelines. Each member has to have completed at least a first draft of a novel-length work, which they’ll be submitting to the group. Since our group is small, everyone’s work will be critiqued each meeting, 30 pages at a time. And to keep the focus on the work, we’re meeting at a college campus (so no latte orders, dinner orders or servers to distract us). Meetings are set to be the last Monday of the month and attendance will be strictly enforced.

I’m really excited to see how this group works together. We all submitted our manuscripts to each other a month ago, and each project is so unique. We have different styles of fiction: women’s fiction, literary fiction, medical drama, so it’ll be great to get all those different perspectives.

What have your experiences (good or bad) been with workshop groups? Any other guidelines you can suggest to make sure it stays strong?