The Importance of Privacy: A Writers' Group for One

by Betsy Hanson

Four years ago, when I started writing books for children, I decided to try being part of a critique group with five other women writers. The first few meetings were delightful; I loved being with others who were passionate about children's books.

For a year we continued to meet, but more and more sporadically, with fewer in attendance, and less new work to critique. Even before we cordially disbanded, however, I realized that for me, writers' groups, or workshop-style writing classes, simply do not work. I will never join another.

The theory is that by sharing our work with other writers, we will improve because we are getting feedback from others in the biz. I find, in fact, that being a writer makes me a terrible—and even hazardous—judge of others' manuscripts. If the writing is good, I feel jealous or competitive or incompetent, and who wants to hear from someone wrestling with these goblins? If I can see what's "wrong" with the work, I want to quickly fix it so that it sounds like what I would write. And the more I like a fellow writer as a person, the less able I am to be honest, sometimes falling into praising work just because I so enjoy the creator.

Writers' groups also presume that sharing work in progress is a good idea. I believe that sharing work in progress is a bad idea, and probably the best way to guarantee that you will never finish what you have started. There's something about talking about an idea or characters or settings, or ripping one's first attempts untimely from the womb, that kills the need (or confidence) to go on. A writer needs the privacy of working on a manuscript from beginning to end, then going back and revising and fitting pieces together into a complete first draft, before showing it to anyone else.

I have returned to my practice of telling no one, not even my husband or sons, what I'm working on while I'm working on it, except perhaps to say "play", "novel", "picture book text". Recently, on finishing a mid-grade novel, I contacted a third-grade teacher and asked her to share the manuscript with some of her students. I trusted the opinions of these target readers (none of whom knew me) much more than I would have those of my friends, family members, or other writers.

The hardest part of writing, for me, is to go deeply into my heart and put what I find there on paper, not what I imagine someone else expects me to say or would like to hear. To do this, I have to be alone, I have to be free to write stupidly and sentimentally and awkwardly, without worrying about what someone else will think. This means isolation, not collaboration. With other writers I can share ideas about the creative process, or about the business details of contracts, publishers, and grants, but I won't ask them to read my manuscripts, and I decline requests to read theirs.

I challenge others to give up writers' groups and workshops for a year and see what happens. My bet is that they will feel lonely and uncertain but will finish an ambitious project, something closer to their true writerly souls than anything they've done before.

Betsy Hanson lives in Seattle and writes in a small studio in Fremont.