Starting a Writing Group

How to write a lot: a practical guide to productive academic writing - Silvia Paul J. 2019

Starting a Writing Group

Complaining is the birthright of professors everywhere, especially when the topic is writing: how we frittered away spring break on chores and chocolate, how our grant proposal sounds as compelling as a treatise on maritime law, how our dissertation is going so badly that we suspect that it’s planning to break up with us. Complaining about writing is usually bad, especially when it invokes the specious barriers described in Chapter 2. But can we harness the proud scholarly tradition of grousing for the sake of good instead of evil? Can we apply our atavistic academic instinct toward collective kvetching to help us write a lot?

This chapter describes how you can create your own writing group. A good writing group will reinforce your writing schedule, make writing feel less solitary, and stave off the darkness of binge writing. These groups come in many flavors, as this chapter shows, so you’ll probably find one that sounds tasty.

WHAT MAKES A WRITING GROUP WORK?

Nothing in life fails quite as flamboyantly as a dysfunctional group. Because they focus on frustrating, long-range goals, writing groups are prone to collapsing into a smoldering heap of coffee grounds and grievances. If your writing group makes you discouraged and embittered, you should leave and start a new one. Staying in a wayward writing group, like hanging out with the “bad crowd” of miscreants and no-good-niks in high school, will stunt your intellectual development.

Most writing groups work fine, plodding along from week to week, and some groups are excellent. What makes a writing group work? My informal experience suggests that a good writing group involves voluntary association and the lack of hierarchy: It’s more anarchism than socialism (Milstein, 2010). Voluntary groups are made of members who want to be there and choose to keep coming back. You shouldn’t force people to attend, but coerced attendance is common once you look for it. A mentoring program for new faculty, for example, might start an “optional, but we can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want to do it” writing group for its impressionable members. A director of graduate training for a department might require all the grad students to take part in a monthly writing retreat. Directors of large research labs might impose a writing group on all the grad students and postdocs.

Founders of obligatory groups have good intentions—they don’t want struggling writers to slip through the cracks. But some people have good writing habits and don’t need a writing group. Others are lone wolves who would rather type alone, far from the distracting howls of the pack. And still others are struggling binge writers who aren’t ready to change. Coerced writing groups, although common, usually end up with the dour culture of a court-ordered 12-step program.

To avoid a hierarchy, consider putting professors and grad students into different groups. Some professors are alarmed to hear this, their egalitarian sensibilities offended, but most grad students know what happens when professors join student groups. The professor will inevitably slip into a teaching role, turning the group into just another seminar or workshop. Grad students often feel intimidated in a faculty group, erroneously thinking that their writing goals are less important. And, of course, it’s hard to do hilarious and pointed impressions of your adviser when other professors are around.

If you’re a grad student, you probably have a lot of friends facing the same challenges, so why not found a group? Starting a student-only group is a great way for students to stay focused on their long-range projects, lend each other support, and justify buying the bigger box of doughnuts. But you might keep your writing group a secret from your adviser—he or she might want to join.

THREE FLAVORS OF WRITING GROUPS

Goals and Accountability Groups

It is amazing what people will do to fit in with a group. When high-schoolers conform in ways we disapprove of, like smoking behind the gym or applying make-up with the obsessive fastidiousness of a historic preservationist, we call it peer pressure. Academics and scholars have matured, of course, so when we conform to group pressure we call it adhering to best practices, consulting stakeholders, and seeking accountability.

Accountability is all that most people need out of a writing group. Once we have chosen a weekly writing schedule, we need to stick to it. It sounds easy—and for some people it is—but many of us could use a nudge to stick to our schedule. Tracking our writing (see Chapter 3) is a great nudge, but there’s no nudge quite like the expectant looks of our peers when they ask, “So, how was your week?” (Nicolaus, 2014).

I have been in a writing group—the University of North Carolina at Greensboro Agraphia Group—that has met most weeks for around 15 years. Writing-group years are like dog years, so a 15-year-old writing group is old enough to attract the attention of historic preservationists. Our group focuses on accountability and goals, the two big motivational forces that keep people on schedule. The system is simple. At each meeting we read off the goals we set the last week, say if we met them, and then set new goals for the coming week. As you might expect from a support group founded by psychologists, it applies some crafty principles of behavior change.

Keep It Simple

Our group has a low barrier to entry: We run open-ended, come-as-you-are meetings for anyone who wants to show up and set some writing goals. Agraphia meets weekly for around 20 minutes, usually at the coffee shop next to campus, occasionally on campus. Each semester, there’s a solid core of three or four people who attend nearly every week and a larger group of people who pop in when they can. A few grizzled veterans have been coming for years and years, much like counselors in a rehab center who were once clients. Other members come for a few months, absorb the basic message and habits, and then reintegrate into society. And some people come only once and decide it isn’t for them.

Set Good Goals

Our group focuses on setting goals for the next week. Motivation science shows that proximal goal setting boosts motivation (Bandura, 1997). These goals are concrete and short-term, like the writing goals described in Chapter 3. When goals are abstract, it is hard to know if you’re making good progress; when goals are long-range, it is easy to put them off. Each member sets a concrete goal for the next week, such as making an outline, finishing a section of a manuscript, reading a book, or writing 1,000 words. These are tangible—you’ll know if you didn’t do it. Academics are highly trained in using words to wiggle out of awkward spots, so the group should keep its members focused on good goals. The group should gently mock goals starting with think about, try to, or work on—not because thinking and trying are bad, but because finishing is better.

Keep Track

Humans are both frail and forgetful, so you can guess what happens if you don’t write down everyone’s goals. The next week, a certain convenient ignorance descends upon the members—“Did I say 2,000 words? I think it was 1,000, right?” History may be written by the victors, but it’s revised by historians who didn’t meet their writing goal. We bring the Folder of Goals to each meeting, and each person says what he or she plans to do before the next meeting. We write the goals down and keep the folder in a HIPAA-compliant file cabinet that shows only minor signs of fire damage at the hands of our chagrined members. And at the start of the next meeting, we lay out the past week’s goals and say whether we met them. Figure 4.1 shows a sheet of goals.

FIGURE 4.1. An example of our agraphia group’s goals.

We prefer keeping paper records in file folders. It might sound quaint, but our group is so old that our earliest records are cuneiform tablets. And we have had many members who studied history, material culture, library science, and (in all seriousness) historic preservation, so paper documents are what they preferred. But you can keep track in other ways, like a blog or social-media group. Just make sure the members can’t wiggle out of their goals.

Don’t Overthink It

Your group’s members won’t always meet their goals. We are busy humans in an unpredictable world, and everything takes longer than we expect. It’s not a big deal. This isn’t a 12-step group that yanks away your chips if you relapse into binge writing. There’s no need for a coroner’s inquest into what went awry. Just set a new goal—perhaps a smaller, more realistic one—or roll the goal over to the next week. If someone stalls for a few weeks, the group can step in and ask about work habits and writing schedules. But the lines between explanations, excuses, and complaints are fine, so just focus on the future.

The goals-and-accountability theme has many variations, so feel free to vary the group’s design. Some groups have one person act as a facilitator; others set an expiration date (e.g., the group will dissolve after a semester or an academic year). Many groups ask members to commit to attending every meeting—usually when they serve nice snacks—and a few discuss books after setting their goals. The peers are the active ingredient. So long as the group creates that adolescent twinge of not fitting in—“Everyone else is going to show up with their writing goals met!”—your accountability group will, shall we say, evoke stakeholder feedback consistent with best practices.

Write-Together Groups

When babies get together on play dates, they do what developmental psychologists call parallel play: they sit next to each other but play alone, mostly ignoring each other until another kid tries to snatch Ruffy McWoofers. And what works for 11-month-olds shouting and banging together toy trucks works for assistant professors banging out books on the problematic discourse of transportation. All you need is a room, some people to sit in it and ignore you, and a spill-proof sippy cup for your coffee.

The “shut up and write” model, for example, involves showing up to a room, giving its occupants a curt and flinty nod, and then writing. Some groups meet for scheduled times; others have a drop-in site that’s open all day. Some groups meet online, often with video software that allows the group members to see each other ignoring each other—eerie, perhaps, but not the strangest thing that happens on the Internet. A few groups plan long retreats—a weekend in the woods or a week-long boot camp—as a kind of rehab for writing projects that have hit rock bottom.

If your parallel-play group meets regularly, week-in and week-out, it starts to look like a communal writing schedule. And sharing a schedule really works: the mix of peer pressure, habit, and ritual creates a powerful culture of productive writing. The biggest risk of write-together groups is that the members slip into chatty gossip—not a shocking outcome when you put people who talk for a living into a room to work quietly on something they’d rather avoid. To prevent this, you can plan for ritual social breaks—such as the first 15 minutes or after every 50 minutes—and make sure that I’m not invited.

Feedback Groups

Of the many flavors of writing groups, feedback groups are the bitterest. These groups are a TV trope: An aspiring novelist joins a weekly “writing group” that spends each meeting critiquing one member’s work, and each member gets a turn in the passive-aggressive spotlight. Humans are too frail for such a system. I’ve visited with several feedback groups in various stages of collapse, and it’s easy to see the design flaws while tip-toeing through the wreckage.

Because only one member is “up” each meeting, that person will spend the prior week binge writing while the other members coast. Unless everyone has similar scholarly interests, few members will have useful feedback on your chapter about colonial imagery in Portuguese admiralty law. And inevitably the system fractures when someone fails to get the pages to the group on time—there’s nothing for the group to discuss except the dawning realization that the members are spending hours each week critiquing someone else’s work instead of writing their own.

On the bright side, these groups are life-changing when they work smoothly. The members churn out the pages, get insightful peer feedback, find inspiration in each other’s writing, and mature intellectually together. A good feedback group is a precious thing, something the members should cherish and keep secret from newcomers who might break the spell. But good feedback groups are rare, and I’d discourage you from starting one. A feedback group larger than a trio of friends usually ends in hurt feelings and restraining orders.

Because this sort of group is popular on TV—it does indeed lend itself to drama—feedback groups are the first model many people try. But most of us don’t need our peers for month-in, month-out feedback on manuscripts. If we do, perhaps there’s a person—an adviser or colleague—who might help. What we all need is some time (a weekly writing schedule), a place (any location not currently pelted with hail or afflicted by locusts), and a nudge (willpower for some, peer pressure for others). That’s what the other flavors of writing groups provide.

CONCLUSION

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1945) once quipped that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function” (p. 69). Finding myself becoming more contradictory in my thinking as I grow older, I like this idea—probably because it implies that I’m growing wiser when I’m really slipping into the addlepated confusion of parenthood. This chapter considered the two contradictions of academic writing groups: misery loves company and hell is other people. Bringing struggling writers together creates opportunities for growth, peer mentorship, and the occasional free doughnut. Yet people are wary of joining writing groups for good reasons. Putting embittered writers in a room to coruminate about their stalled projects and thwarted ambitions sometimes makes everyone feel worse, even when someone brings doughnuts. We considered a few flavors of writing groups—goals groups, write-together groups, and feedback groups. Feel free to pick one that appeals to you, and mix and match parts that might work (such as a write-together group that also sets goals).

If you’re sitting in the room with your writing group and need to distract yourself from the open box of apple fritters, why not immerse yourself in English usage and style? It will make both your biological and textual corpus sleeker, as the next chapter shows.