Find your writing peers

How to overcome our imposter syndrome and fears to find other writers who support us without collapsing into a ball of anxiety.

Hi friends,

I was so nervous.

It had been over ten years since I had participated in a writing group with total strangers, but I had a book to finish. I was learning the importance of growing my local writing community if I wanted to make it as an indie writer. And I needed to know that my work-in-progress would be appreciated by people who knew nothing about me.

So I signed up with my local public library and spent a Thursday evening with a room full of aspiring writers of all ages crowded around a single table. We read our writing, and gave our feedback. I left feeling like I had both contributed as a writer and teacher and had gotten the feedback I needed to get back to my own writing.

Those outside of the writing world often believe that we writers are recluses who spend our time with the door shut as we click away on the keyboard, only to emerge when we have finally finished our masterpiece or we’re the lonely observer at the coffee shop, sipping our lattes while pumping out page after page of text in a couple of hours.

While yes, many of us do fall into that writer trope, lone wolves producing for the masses, what many non-writers fail to understand is there are a lot of steps between the angsty first draft produced in the privacy of an office and the final draft that we send out into the world. Many of them involve sharing our work with other humans *shutter*

This oversimplified view of the writing process also cuts out one of the most important steps in our writing development: seeking the input of others.

As a high school teacher, I have tried many different iterations of peer editing and writing groups, but I admit that I’ve never met the success that I experienced as both an undergraduate and graduate student in English programs. It takes a significant amount of maturity and vulnerability to share our words with others. Regardless of the genre, we pour a lot of ourselves into that work and allowing someone else to come in and tell us where we could do better can initially feel like a personal attack.

But if you want to improve as a writer, you have to be willing to put your work in front of a select group of fellow writers before entrusting that work to the public. Here are four different ways to develop those collaborative muscles.

Identify your “first” readers

This is what Stephen King calls writing “with the door open.” In his book On Writing, he encourages writers to write first with the door closed. It allows us to experiment and play with ideas and words. But once that first draft is completed, we need to open the door before we start the rewrite. We are often blinded by our own brilliance. We need trusted readers who will help us see our weaknesses and identify those strengths on which we need to build.

This is one of those places where the Internet and social media has been a huge help in my writing journey. My friend Rachel and I had two writing classes together in college before we were thrown together as student teaching partners. We renewed our connection over Facebook by initially sharing lesson plans across cyberspace, but that quickly transitioned to writing feedback once I started graduate school. She became one of the few people I trusted to give me honest feedback before I made my work more public, and I occasionally returned the favor. I met my second “first” reader when I started my third teaching job. I was a nine-year teaching veteran and Alicia was a fresh new teacher. Our relationship eventually blossomed into a friendship and then a partnership where we were sharing our work with each other, giving feedback, and preparing our work for publication.

Without these two writing friendships, I would not be the writer that I am today. Find the people who will tell you the truth in love and are willing to work to make your writing the best that it can be. And once you find those people, hold onto them and return the favor. 

Join a book club

I have found that the more I read and the more I discuss what I’ve read, the more I understand myself as a writer. I don’t want to make it sound like my classroom is an utopian ideal, but some of my favorite days teaching a novel in AP Literature were the days that my students were sitting in a circle discussing what they’d read. As they made connections between the text and different themes and similar texts, the ideas started flying and eventually, some of those ideas made it into their essays.

When we become adults, we sometimes forget those magical classroom moments. We forget what it is like to have someone facilitating a discussion that gets our brain firing on all cylinders. Those discussions don’t just make the reading experience more enjoyable, but they also make us better writers.

Check out your library or local bookstore and find out what book clubs are happening each month. You don’t have to go every month, but if there is a book that you are interested in reading, put it on top of your pile and just show up. You might even find some additional writing buddies in the process.

Find a local writing group

There were a lot of things I loved about college, but one of the things I missed the most as an academic was the opportunity to truly collaborate with a group of other writers to improve our craft.

I got to experience it all over again when I started graduate school, only this time I was in writing classes with undergraduate and graduate students working together to produce deeper and more challenging work. After several years of commenting on high school student papers, I once again fell in love with discussing my own writing and seeing the work of my peers develop with each draft.

There really is nothing like sitting around a table with fellow writers to talk about our work and see it grow and develop over weeks and months. You don’t have to return to college or start an MFA program to reap those benefits. Start with your local public library or independent bookstores. Find out if there is a writing center in your city. I’m lucky enough to live in a city with a robust indie writing scene. My county library right outside of Indianapolis has a group that meets once a month. The Indiana Writers Center is located right in the city and we have a growing independent book store scene. The National Writing Project has workshops for teachers, but they might also have recommendations for writers who are just trying to find their people. Indie Author Insider on Substack has updates about writing opportunities in places all over the country. And if there isn’t anything local, ask your library if you can start a group yourself. Some libraries just don’t have the staff to host a group but they would love more volunteers. Take charge and make a writing group happen.

Expand to an online audience

If you can’t find a writing group in person, start looking for your people online. There is a lot of debate about which word processing tools we should be using, but I honestly love using Google Docs. Does it have all of the tools of Word? No. Is it easy to create a book to upload into a paperback on KDP or IngramSpark? Not really. But if you want to share a document with someone else and get their honest feedback, Google Docs is the best way to do so. And the fact that you can share it with multiple people at once makes it the perfect tool for online writing groups.

If you feel like you have compositions that you are ready to turn into something significant, I highly recommend using a beta team to give you honest feedback about your work. This takes it beyond your “first” readers and to others who may or may not be expert writers, but they are still invaluable to a solid final product, especially if you are pursuing indie publishing. The beta readers that I have enlisted for my first two books have completely transformed my writing. They have taken my ideas and turned them into something that I believe other readers will appreciate. Your beta team only needs to be a few people, but it can be fun to see the conversation between team members form in the margins as you all puzzle out the best move forward.

We are social creatures and if we ever hope to see our work read by strangers, we need the support and feedback of fellow writers to make our words soar. Find your people and get to work.

What do you think?

• Do you have a writer’s group?

• Are you scared to share you work with other people?

Let us know in the comments.

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Photo by Andraz Lazic on Unsplash