What we’re about
WHO WE ARE:
The Good Enough Writing Workshop, online — Peer Feedback &c. is an online peer-review workshopping group. You can share and get feedback on fiction, poetry, song, creative nonfiction. Although we don't have any scriptwriters now, you are welcome to bring us any TV, film, or stage scripts that you’ve been working on.
The group is nominally based in Toronto but we welcome people from around the world. For example, I'm living in Chicago these days but will be moving to Berlin next year.
If you are serious about writing and are looking to meet and connect with other writers, please join us! Which is to say, we are happy to welcome new writers or ones who have been at it for a while. But we ask that you have a strong commitment to your craft — or to improving it. Most of our active members have professional ambitions for their writing. This need not be your case but we do hope you work hard on your writing.
Likewise, if your focus is on genre fiction, we might not be your best readers. This is not intended as a judgement on genre fiction. We can only be good at so much in this life and our active members are more focused on literary and experimental fiction. That said, if what you write is a mashup of genres — or genre taken to the level of art — this might be a better match for our reading backgrounds.
I think it's important to keep in mind that writing can only ever be "good enough" — just as the feedback we give can never be perfect. As the Italian proverb said, "l meglio è l'inimico del bene" — the perfect is the enemy of the good. As writers, we are too often prevented from doing good work because we don't think it's perfect. It's much easier to improve what is good enough than to improve nothing at all.
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Note: we usually post only a few days, hours, or minutes before a meeting. Some short pieces have been added during meetings. But we're a great group!
We lean a little on the smart, contemporary literary or experimental fiction and poetry. Some of us share music; that ranges from experimental pop through to folk and singer songwriter (or early-2000s garage rock).
We have had traditional genre writers but it wasn't a great fit.
Let me know if you have any questions!
Best is to contact me through the form on my website:
https://www.v11.org/contactform
(NB. I don't always see direct messages or comments on Meetup. I turn off the Meetup alerts because, if they have a way of only sending me notifications about direct messages or comments, I haven't found it!)
You can find more information on how the peer-feedback groups are run on my website:
https://www.v11.org/workshop-guidelines
Ideally, we ask writers to post their texts ahead of time so people can read and think about them beforehand. But … sometimes there just isn't time. We only share up to about a 1000-word text at a time. But you can serialize a longer text. This is for two reasons:
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You get a closer read and more fine-grained feedback than if you shared a whole chapter at a time.
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These days many of us don't have time to do extra reading!
We share these texts (etc.) on Dropbox. As such, if you haven't sent me the email associated with your Dropbox account or need a (free) account, please see here: https://www.v11.org/contactform
Don't be shy about dropping by. The idea of workshopping your writing can be frightening so we encourage you to join us before you're ready to share. It's also important to "pay it forward" — no fly-by-nights!
If you have any questions, it's best to send me a note through the contact form at the foot of the first page of my website, here:
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Note that Meetup sends out a truckload of emails and alerts; you can control how many you get from us (and other groups) here:
https://www.meetup.com/account/comm/