An earlier group member suggested that groups were intended for novelists. That bothered me as a nonfiction writer. I've been in a Philadelphia group that welcomed poets, playwrights, screenwriters, novelists, short-story writers, and, of course, nonfiction writers. Is there any reason to exclude anyeone but novelists? Lyn, Switzerland
Hi, Lyn!
I rather like your idea of a mixed group. If you'd filed your comment as a reply instead of posting a new question, I'd have given it a thumbs up. Unfortunately, this is impossible to award to thought-provoking questions.
There are - I suppose - novelists who obsess on novels. But then I suspect that a large number of them obsess on their OWN novels. I can just imagine a group sitting around, fixed smiles, each thinking: "When is this boring old fart [variant: "this young, clueless twit with no experience of Life"] going to give it a rest and let somebody read something of REAL merit?"
Meanwhile, a group of open-minded writers of different disciplines might find it a bit of a "holiday" to hear and critique work outside their own speciality.
I don't mean to imply that all novelists are self-centred, or that one type of group is BETTER than another, just that there's a niche for each... given the right kind of members.
Not really! It depends a lot on the people in the group, I'd say.
When you have a bunch of novelists, they can tailor their group's schedule to suit them - meet every week with a new chapter, work simultaneously on specific plot points and then compare progress later, have parties for 10K reached, whatever.
When you have a bunch of poets, they can do the same - agree to work with a specific theme, or specific form, or revise some of their old poems, or write a specific number of them, etc etc.
When you have a versatile bunch, you can't make a schedule or plan ahead in a way that makes everyone do the same thing - because you have one who puts together one file of non-fiction-related research, one who writes an essay, one who writes three poems, and one who needs critiques on the new 1000 words. That means everyone needs to be prepared and somewhat able to give constructive feedback on all those things, even if they're outside of their personal comfort zones.
The more different writers you include, the more flexible you and all of them should be - which, truth to be told, is a problem for a lot of people, but doesn't need to be an obstacle in the way of making a mixed writing group work.