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I saw David McNelly’s post looking for folks to join a small Chicago writing group on Craigslist and asked him to describe the group for me.

All our writing group’s decisions are made by consensus. When someone new wants to join, we try and trade a few pieces of fiction first so that  we establish the writing is both good and what we are looking for.

We haven’t added anyone other than our original five because many who have asked to join recently are novelists, playwrights, or poets. We want to concentrate on critiquing short stories and we all are either sending out stories for publication or are getting our stories honed so that we can do so soon.

By having a diversity of people in the group, we are able to get some different readings of the piece so that the writer can choose what sort of audience to focus on.

I formed the group by posting on craigslist and the first five people who responded who wrote short stories and other short fiction were invited to meet at a coffeeshop on the north side. We ended up meeting at the Belmont stop, but then realized we all lived close to or in Andersonville, so we switched to a coffee shop there. We meet twice a month and turn in stories once a month in a rotating basis.

In an ordinary meeting, we talk for about half an hour at the beginning, especially if people are trickling in, about what sorts of artistic things we do, about books we are reading, the publishing process, our dreams, literary journals, bikes, moving, etc.

Then, we take about half an hour for each story (normally 3) talking first about what we think the story is about, and what it is in it’s essence, then we move on to things we liked and then suggestions for revision. It’s the standard process for workshopping.

We would like to ideally be between 6-8 people, but we like the balance that we have so much, that it’s hard to add anyone else. We expect each group member to write out their critique, make it a page single-spaced or the equivalent, and make editing notes on the story and give it to the writer.

We’ve only met 4 times now, but we get along really well together, and I hope we start to see some acceptance letters from literary journals soon.

I just want to add a note that Craigslist is not the only way to find other like-minded writers. This was posted to the CWA forum:

I’m a member of two writing groups — I found them both via meetup.com. Both are small and meet in coffee shops. One is focused on speculative fiction and meets monthly in Lakeview. The other is more general although we have a fondness for poetry, experimental dramatics, and lit-fic — it meets every
other week in the Loop (and no longer uses meetup).

Lynn Voedisch has a lot to say about writing groups.