Writing Online Critique Group Guidelines

In the Beginning

Due to the pandemic, numerous regional writing groups, long accustomed to physically gathering to attend live presentations or reviews, have morphed into online critique groups.

Members of an at-large writing group in Utah have been participating in online critique sessions for eight years. When the chapter first began using email to exchange chapters or stories for critique, the newly formed ‘online’ group contained three members. These three barely knew each other, but they did know each other’s work and verbally set word count limits for submissions. Life was simple that year as we grew from three members to five. 

Then the membership grew by at least half a dozen every year. New members didn’t know each other and most of them didn’t know any of us either. Before long I realized the time of verbal agreements had ended. We needed more structure, including a set of guidelines that everyone in the group received and tacitly agreed to honor.

By the time we reached twenty-five members, each inquiry response was accompanied by a “thank you for your interest” email along with a copy of our guidelines. This pattern helped form a familiar understanding of norms and expected review etiquette while we grew to 45 members.

Forming Guidelines

Last month I attended a good-sized virtual writing meeting on ZOOM. Near the end, a participant said she’d started an online critique group. Despite her efforts, the group had problems and she was expected to resolve member complaints. She admitted she needed to either develop a set of member guidelines or give up on the group. Forming an online critique group without guidelines opens the door for confusion, disappointments, and hurt feelings. And yet, writing and disseminating guidelines doesn’t help to avoid mayhem if the members don’t ‘buy in’ to them.

Unfortunately, I assumed that every member in our group had read, understood, and agreed upon our guidelines by virtue of their membership fee and participation. I never asked for implicit approval of our review and critique standards and expectations. I guess I should have done something like that because last fall this cost us three members.

Our guidelines include general formatting rules like serif fonts, double line spacing, author’s name or initials in the file name, and abiding by the maximum word count (3200). The guidelines also request that members be polite and helpful in their reviews, plus the guideline that they write at least five to ten comments or suggestions per submission.

Buy-In

What I didn’t know until too late was that we had a member who wouldn’t review pieces she found the slightest bit objectionable. She wouldn’t even comment on submissions from people whose prose she had found objectionable in the past. If she did return the submission from these members, she would just write that she didn’t find anything ‘wrong’.

I didn’t know she was ignoring one of our most important guidelines until one of the shunned members told me she was quitting the group and why. I apologized, but she said her feelings had been hurt and she was leaving. The next day I asked the offending reviewer about it and she felt she had done nothing wrong. I explained that members whose feelings had been hurt left because of her non-reviews and I asked that she provide feedback for every submission she received in the future.

In a huff, she quit attending. Her leaving was all right with the group participants, but I felt bad about losing the two productive writers who had been with us for years, especially since they left with sore feelings.

Conclusion

According to an article in Writer’s Digest: “Writers don’t join critique groups to have their egos stroked (if you did, you’re in the wrong place). Writers join critique groups to become better writers.” And no writer improves if all anyone says about their work is, “I liked it.” Or, in the case I described above, “I didn’t see anything wrong.”

I’m not sure how I could have avoided that calamity in our group since I don’t receive copies of everyone’s reviews, but I believe periodic member surveys would serve us well. Perhaps then we’ll know if someone is causing problems before it comes to a head.