Writing Advice by Poppy Gee

How do you find other like-minded writers to form a writer's group, or become beta readers. What are the advantages or disadvantages of sharing your work prior to publication?

I’ve used informal writer critique arrangements a lot over the past few years.

But I’m going to stop.

I’ve had amazing feedback from people. I’ve learned so much. But I’m at a point where I need to write from the heart, with honesty and vulnerability, with creative freedom, and not try to write according to formulas of crime fiction, or anything else. That’s a personal decision for me.

Writer critiques groups can be wonderful, and awful. In my first writers’ group, fifteen years ago, a writer friend wrote in pen at the top of my pages: ‘A great novel breaks your heart. Your novel didn’t break my heart.’ Her words have remained with me. I’ve dwelled on this topic: How do I write a novel that will break someone’s heart? I don’t know how to.

The gist of what she was saying, was that my novel didn’t feel important to her. Not every book is for every reader. I have a thick enough skin to understand that. However, her words still haunt me.

This year I’ve had amazing feedback from different writers for my ski lodge mystery. It’s all practical advice, and very constructive. However, some precious advice came this week from my beautiful friend Michael Burge who was in Brisbane launching his novel Dirt Trap. I interviewed him at Books at Stones. Afterward, a bunch of us went for dinner at the pub next door. I confessed that I was not enjoying my proofreading/polishing of my ski lodge mystery. I said I feel like it’s crap, too boring, not crime fiction-y enough.

And he said: Poppy, you're an experienced enough storyteller to know what you’re doing with a narrative arc, yet you’re also wise enough to fear what your story is saying; but this novel need only be whatever you want it to be, and that’s all that matters. The compelling aspects of your story are its LGBT themes and the way you’ve recreated Tasmanians in the mid-1990s with all their struggles along the state’s journey to equality. Focus on them, because that’s original and it’s more than enough dark stuff of the human experience to be a crime novel. Just let these characters tell us their stories. 

That’s the kind of wise, kind and encouraging feedback that makes you want to keep writing/polishing/submitting.