What Your Writing Group Won’t Tell You

Matthew Woodall
5 min readMar 29, 2021

But you desperately need to hear

Like many other people, I’m in some writing support groups on Facebook. You know the ones — people go to have their writing edited, their back patted, and to whine when they don’t get the results they expect from their writing. While these are a nice exercise in mutual admiration, very rarely do they provide any substantial help.

We all want to be known as nice people — I’m no exception. I’ve offered some advice and provided some basic editing/beta reading support for people. Rarely will I ever say what I really, truly think — I don’t know these people and I really don’t have the energy to get into an in-depth conversation about why I’m offering advice…especially if the advice is not what people want to hear.

So, to help all of us out I want to share with you the five things your social media writing group wants to tell you (but are too nice to do so).

Nobody is an overnight success.

I see this happen all the time, someone starts writing on an open platform and expects immediate success. They get pulled in by the idea of earning hundreds or thousands of dollars — only to find that their earnings are more often measured in pennies. I’m one of the lucky ones, I’m a professional writer who earns thousands of dollars a month —…

--

--