Online Writing Groups

Have you heard of writing groups before and wondered what they are. Could they help you to become a better writer?

Writing groups will alloe you to meet other writers, read their work, have your work written and hear a range of views on what is good and bad about it.

The writing group will not just give you a sense of what you need to change about a particular piece of writing. Ideally you will find that the process of reading the writings of others will show you how to achieve things in your own writing that you cannot. The critical thing is that you engage with the processnof critical reading, not just reading like a consumer.

In order to function a writing group requires a lot of trust. You need to trust the other members of your group. They will be seeing your intellectual property in a state long before it will be released, and vice versa. You also need to trust the opinions of others, which can be no small feat for most of us, given that out creative output resides so close to our egos.

The issue of trust is where most online writer's groups fail. The face to face contact of a traditional writer's group builds trust between people, and helps smooth over the inevitable problems that occur when you receive some harsh criticism.

That is the problem that needs to be solved before online writing groups can replace real world ones.

Wool by Hugh Howey

This is the first book by a self-published author that I have truly loved. I have read a lot that I enjoyed, but Hugh Howey grabbed me with this book in a way that made me compulsively buy the rest of the series.

The book is in my weakness genre: apocalypse scenarios and the civilizations that emerge in their aftermath. Nevertheless, Hugh Howey has such a unique approach to the genre that justifies his immense success with this book.

The idea is relatively simple. People now live in small collectives buried under the ground in silos. The society is highly segregated by occupation and people live in fear of breaking one of the rules that will result in them being sent outside to 'clean' the lens of the camera that shows them the decaying outside world. You are thrown into this world and immediately begin to question what is 'known' about the outside and the history of the world. The highly constrained world you are presented with is perfect for creating suspense and mystery. You learn more about the world as the daring characters of the world challenge the authorities. It is well crafted, believable and enjoyable to read.

I highly recommend Wool by Hugh Howey to anyone with a penchant for post-apocalypse scenarios.