My Critique Group Rocks

There. I said it. We've given ourselves the name The Gang That Writes Short (although some of us also write long on the side). On Tuesday, The Gang made our first group appearance at a St. Louis Writer's Guild open mike night. Our stated goal: domination.

Some backstory: For the past month and a half, we've been writing 1000-word "flash fiction"
as a writing exercise in between our sessions. Each time, there's a different required element to the story. For the first one, for example, in an effort to up the stakes in our writing, we had to include a shooting; for the next session, the stories must include the word "fortnight." (Since we meet every other week, I had observed that we meet, as they say in England, "fortnightly.")

At any rate, on Tuesday, 6 of the 8 of us were brave enough to stand up and read our shooting stories. The cumulative effect ended up being rather bleak, since almost by definition the plots were not happy. But we were all very psyched.

I can't believe how much energy this group has given me. Since we started up in January, I've written 3 stories and am in the middle of the 4th (the fortnight one). It's amazing to be able to sit around over a drink and discuss whether creative writing classes are worth the money, whether we want to "out" ourselves to friends and family about being writers, and whether we'd keep writing if we knew we'd never publish a book. Being in a short story group has also enabled me to sidestep the whole issue of getting a novel published; instead, I'm working in a different form for a while. In the back of my mind, I'm hoping to go back to novels someday, but for now I'm trying to practice having fun.


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Note: If any of my readers want to try their hands at super-short fiction, over at The Verb, a 500-word story could win you $100.