SUNDAY, 1 DECEMBER 2024

As a writer who lives alone and has no friends living nearby who are interested in literature or the arts, I recently did research to find some online writing groups and I even went as far as joining a couple of them. The deeper I dipped into these groups, though, the more discouraged I became.

Firstly, many of the posters are arrogant and dogmatic in response to other members’ work. People often put up a sample of their writing on these platforms and ask for feedback and advice, and many of the responses are brusque and formulaic in the extreme: ‘Your sentences are too long’, ‘Never use words such as “whispered” and “guffawed” as reporting verbs – use “said” at all times’, ‘Cut out all the adverbs’, ‘Avoid passive sentences’, ‘Your introduction is long-winded – readers want action at once or you lose them’, ‘Always show, never tell’, etc. I feel like writing to the people seeking advice and telling them to ignore these self-appointed fonts of wisdom on all things literary because anyone who thinks in such a black-and-white manner is highly unlikely to be a good writer, or indeed a good reader.

Then there are those who fixate on the grammar and delight in pointing out grammatical errors and spelling mistakes in the original post. Rather than respond to the more complex issues of plotting or characterisation or point of view or metre and rhythm, these posters zone in like a guided missile on a language error: ‘the amount of people’, ‘he could of done’, and so on. Apparently, Keats was a terrible speller – just imagine how much better a writer he could have been if only he’d been blessed with the advice of these mavens. Also, despite their supreme self-confidence in their own expertise, they are often factually wrong on points of grammar (I feel qualified to state this, having taught English for around thirty years).

Another common type is the show-off. This is the person who tells us how many books he has published, how many copies he has sold, how wonderful his reviews have been, blah blah blah. I say ‘he’ because I nearly always get the impression that this poster is a ‘he’, although I did come across one woman who talked as if she put the Brontes in the shade. Interestingly, these authors never actually tell us the name of their masterpieces so we can check their claims about the number of books sold and the glowing reviews they received. I have to say that I’m impressed by such reserve. After all their endless and effortless success, these giants of the writing world still show the humility and consideration not to share their literary accomplishments with us in case it makes us lesser mortals feel crushed by our comparative inadequacy.

Many of the comments I read make me concerned about the effects of the multitude of books which tell people how to write well. In the confident pronouncements of the self-appointed experts in these writing groups, I can hear the echo of wonderful writers like Orwell and his six rules of writing (his imitators always seem to ignore the sixth rule, though, which is break any of the others when it is necessary), or the more prescriptive work of grammarians such as Fowler and Jespersen, who had a strong feel for language despite mainly focusing on grammar and vocabulary rather than the creative potential and use of words and, more importantly, showed a horror of language being used clumsily and poorly. The people doling out advice on these sites seem to have picked up bits of sage counsel from these real experts on writing (e.g. show, don’t tell) but then turn them into the most rigid of dogma. This makes me dubious about the subtlety of their own work which, interestingly, we never get to actually see (and they would tut-tut-tut about that split infinitive).

Most of these groups are obsessed with genre. The first thing that the posters usually tell us about their work is which specific genre it belongs to, and the subsequent thinking about the writing gets squeezed into this category. Few of the members seem to want to write a great novel or poem or play, but appear mainly interested in how to build a writing career and make money. I accept that this approach is admirably modest and practical and realistic, but this lack of literary ambition still depressed me in a way. I sense that authors aimed much higher in the past, although perhaps this is nostalgia on my part for a past that never existed. Even so, I still think it’s true that if you aim for the mediocre, you’ll hit the mediocre. The finest writing requires risk and I don’t see much risk-taking or a desire to have a unique voice among the authors in these groups.

This safety-first policy goes hand in hand, or perhaps is rooted in, a kind of belief that writing is an esoteric and intrinsically difficult thing to do, and that there is a secret, or perhaps a set of secrets, hidden somewhere about how to do it, and that knowing these secrets will instantly turn a person into a good writer. I’m generalising and being more than a little unfair here because there were many people who showed a more relaxed and realistic attitude to putting pen to paper and did not believe in a magic formula to writing well. They realised that above all it needs practice, hard work, dedication, and, in terms of career and public recognition, a huge dollop of luck.

But what shocked me most of all was how downright rude a lot of the posters could be. Often a neophyte author explains that this is their first attempt at an opening scene in a novel, or the first draft of a poem, and nervously asks for feedback. The self-appointed experts plough in with both feet and no apparent concern for the other person’s feelings.  I’m not advocating being insincere or mealy-mouthed, but we should always display some sensitivity in this situation, especially since judgements of poetry or fiction are necessarily subjective and will differ wildly from reader to reader, so the best we can offer is our personal opinion even if we feel strongly that our opinion is correct. If I’m honest, I have to admit that I personally felt that much of the writing on show was rather weak, but there are ways of being critical and helpful and encouraging without the need to crush someone’s confidence. We must also recognise that on these sites we are often responding to an author’s first drafts and I’m sure everyone who has ever tried to write creatively will know from their own experience how poor a first draft can be. Plus, of course, we may not be as accomplished writers ourselves as we like to imagine we are.

So more than a few of the posts I read left me thinking about the stereotype of writers as passive-aggressive. Some of the members in these groups appear to seethe with half-suppressed aggression as they joyfully thrust the knife between other writers’ ribs and twist it around. I can’t understand the need to be so competitive and sometimes simply nasty. It seems logical that most of the people in these groups are going to be beginners or, like me, failed writers, at least in commercial and critical terms, so why the desperate desire to prove that they are so much better than the rest? Let’s face it, seriously successful writers are not going to be hanging around in these groups, and even if they wanted to, they probably wouldn’t have the time as they discuss offers with agents, go to book signings, and lecture at writing festivals. We are way down the pecking order and surely quiet encouragement and support for each other would be better for all concerned than sniping and denigration.

So eventually I decided I would just get into unnecessary arguments if I became a permanent member of any of these groups and, since I have no wish to waste hours online squabbling pointlessly with strangers (there are thousands of other websites where I can do that), I have withdrawn my membership. I’m sad about this because the idea of a writers’ group whose members kick around ideas, share useful information about the process of writing, editing, publishing and marketing our work, and are genuinely supportive of each other sounds like a welcome break from the isolation that goes with being a writer. A group where this sympathetic support existed would offer the opportunity, if someone is brave enough, to ask for and receive constructive comments and feedback (although I doubt I would ever personally be able to do this since my confidence is too brittle – I’m ashamed to admit that I prefer the bland anonymity of a standard rejection email). But for all the potential benefits writing groups might offer, perhaps sadly it is true that we writers tend to be anti-social and are better off remaining lone wolves.