Group think...

Are you a member of a writers' group? Everybody seems to be a member of a writers' group these days. Even the books on writing laud the institution of writers' groups and their positive impact on learning writers.

Well, I've been a member of several writers' groups and, to be honest, I've found them to be a hit-and-miss proposition.

At its best, a writers' group brings you in contact with other creative, talented and committed writers who can give you helpful criticism of your work and exposure to other ways of thinking, working and writing.

At their worst, writers' groups are merely collections of untalented, lazy and lonely people who come together on a regular basis to gossip and complain, people who scribble a paragraph down on the back of a grocery receipt an hour before the meeting just so that they meet the minimum qualifications of the group.

At one such group, I encountered the horrifying proposition of having one writer bring scene after scene of the most banal but explicit erotica, just so that she could get her kicks by "reading" her dialogue aloud in a dramatic format with a particularly handsome male member of the group. When he expressed his discomfort to some of the us after one particularly awful meeting, we tried to suggest to the writer that she might benefit from having "other voices" act out her work.

She threw a tantrum.

I dropped that group right after that.

On the other hand, I've been in groups that have been massively helpful to my writing. I've worked with very talented, committed writers who worked hard on their own work between meetings and gave excellent, insightful comments on my writing at the meetings.

I still keep in touch with many of those writers and am pretty delighted when I see them get their stuff published, as several have.

Is there a moral to this story? I'm not sure. Maybe it's this: find a writers' group that looks like it would be helpful and then be a hard working, committed member of it; take a moment to review your membership of the group about three months in and dump it quick if you find you're getting little or nothing out of it.

There is another lesson I've learned: never be afraid to try to recruit the talented, hard-working, intelligent members of a writers' group you have quit to join you in a new, better group. A bit mercenary and perhaps a trifle cruel, true, but that strategy has worked very well for me on a couple of occasions.

My two best writers' groups sprang from the wreckage of some very poor ones.