How to have a successful Crit Group

With all of us recently riding high on Shona’s successful well-earned publishing wave (go Shona!), I thought it would be a great time to talk about our wonderful journey together as a crit group. I met everyone through our common bond of being members of Romance Writers of Australia. We met in a café in Applecross. Although a nice social atmosphere, we decided it would be too noisy for our future get-togethers and that it would be better to meet in each other’s homes on a rotational basis.

In the early days although we had fun, we didn’t really have a set meeting format. We often spoke over each other, had no real deadlines for work submitted and our critiquing mainly consisted of discussing the plot a bit and editing punctuation/spelling mistakes. Several years have passed and through many discussions, courses, books read, emails and meetings I believe we have taken our critiquing to a more sophisticated level.

So, what have we learnt that works?

1. Set your meetings for the year – we have our meetings once a month, always on a Wednesday at the same time.
2. The person’s house the meeting is held is the host – they serve the refreshments, email the group the order of work submitted (which is critiqued in the order it was emailed to the group) and they also chair the meeting on the night to make sure everyone receives equal time.
3. Work to be critiqued must be submitted by midnight a week before (often there’s a lot to read…)
4. Maximum submission per person of 10,000 words to be critiqued per meeting
5. Not to get ‘personal’ with work being critiqued and not to take things ‘personally’. We are all there to help each other on the road to publication and we’re mindful of each other’s feelings.
6. Everyone is given the opportunity to have their say about each piece of work submitted
7. We agreed on a set of rules that we all abide by
8. Chocolate is our friend

Through our group ‘wink’ we have formed lasting friendships and I would encourage anyone who is serious about enriching their writing to join a critique group.

For WA romance writers looking to join a crit group a great place to start would be at the Romancing the West conference (through Swancon) at the Hyatt on Saturday 23 April 11 – for further information, see Lesley’s facebook page called ‘Romancing the West’. We hope to see you there.

Happy writing.
Donna