Hanging out with other SFF fans can be fun. Hanging out with other writers can be a growth opportunity, If you want to combine those, I highly recommend writers join a reading group made up of other writers. Why?
- Reading is fun. And what more fun way to do it than in the genre of your interest, and to discuss and compare notes with fans as committed as you?
- Reading will improve your own writing, as long as you read with attention
- Being part of a non-writers group may get you reading but knowing you will have to critique and comment in front of other writers forces you to sharpen your focus to what the writer is doing and how he/she is achieving it
- Hearing what other writers see in a piece can teach you new tools, new ways of looking at work.
- It enables you to hear ‘critiques’ even if you are not producing work ready for critique at the same rate as the reading group meets
- Given it’s not your work, there’s less personal investment, and you can truly listen to the critiques and thereby learn from them
- It will provide a ‘glue’ to keep your writer friends within your network
- People will also chat about other things. Ask how your pieces are going etc. But the focus is not on that. So it keeps your own writing accountable in a non-stressful way.
There are probably other great reasons but those are mine. But where do you find these people? The answer is as varied as the types of reading groups.
Some are online only, and these can obviously be found on places like facebook, twitter, discord, etc
Some are in person and they will likely be part of a local writers/SFF group.
For me, the most high-yield source is conferences and workshops. One of the outcomes of participating in conferences like Readercon or workshops like the Clarion West Flash Fiction workshop is the connections you make. Sometimes that is to editors, or agents, but most commonly it is to other writers. These writers are often also highly motivated (they’re at a con, or doing a workshop) and are invested in improving their craft. And that’s the key to a successful writers’ reading group – is to have a core group of people committed to doing it. Without that, they frequently peter out or the group convenes with no one having read the story.
Following my recent participation in the Clarion West Flash Fiction workshop, I joined a new one of these and have found the format excellent. The pieces we read are all short stories. While I love novels, having a focus on novels in a reading group can rapidly kill it in my experience as people do not regularly have the bandwidth to wade through an entire novel in order to attend every month. The list of pieces is sent out months in advance and includes direct web links to where the stories can be read for free online, removing barriers for participation. And we discuss the pieces on a monthly live zoom call as we are geographically dispersed, but this cuts down on commute time and other barriers.
Have any of you done writers’ reading groups? Any interesting ideas on how to make them sustainable or more high yield? Always interested to hear your thoughts in the comments!
Gideon P. Smith 