Improving Your Craft: Inspire’s Online Critique Groups

Writers write. Usually locked in a room. Alone. For hours. We emerge for potty breaks and coffee breaks. Then we hide back in our room to write. Alone. For hours.

Ultimately we have to return to the world, if only to get what we write into the hands of others. But before we hit “send” to an email, slip our submissions into the mailbox or click “publish” ourselves, we need feedback from people who understand the craft of writing.

Inspire Christian Writers has those people, ready to help you excel in your craft. We have fabulous in-person critique groups, organized regionally. But not everyone’s schedule or circumstances are a fit for an in-person group. Not everyone lives locally. Enter Inspire Christian Writers’ online critique groups.

Last year Inspire Christian Writers birthed its first online critique group. This year, we’re expanding the scope of online groups, forming groups for the following genres:

  • General adult: includes both fiction and non-fiction genres, memoirs, blog posts, articles, devotionals
  • Poetry
  • Screenwriting
  • Children: includes all genres (board, picture book, EZ readers, early chapter, middle grade, young adult, magazine and both fiction and non-fiction)

We are open to other genres or to groups with a specific focus (such memoirs, devotionals or romance novels) and as many groups as we can find willing leaders to facilitate.

Ideally, online groups are limited to a specific number of members with a rotating schedule for submissions throughout the month. This cap limits the number of critiques required each week, yet allows each person a chance to submit within a reasonable time span. Critiques can be done via email or the group can gather online each week via Skype, Google Hangouts or an online chat—whatever works best for the people involved.

If you’d like to be part of an online or an in-person critique group—fill out our Critique Group Interest Form and our group coordinator will respond to you.