I have been away from my regular crit group for about a year. Caring for a new baby will do that. I recently started back up again with a smaller group of people who are more narrowly focused on my preferred genres. I love the difference.

In the previous group, there were long lulls between my submissions. We had enough people that taking turns meant there could be a month or two between any one person’s submissions. That delay made it harder to stay in the ‘excited creation’ phase of making progress on a project. It wasn’t the only thing pushing me that way (mental health and caring for other duties distracted me just fine) but it didn’t help.

Now I’m submitting smaller pieces more regularly. This feels like a positive feedback loop rather than simply treading water. I’m still juggling my writing alongside everything else in my life, but it’s amazing what a difference feeling excited after a critique session makes.

This smaller group’s composition makes a big difference too. While the larger group had plenty of good insight and good questions, there was enough friction between the genres I was writing and the comfort zones of the other writers to derail my enthusiasm. This smaller group is composed solely of genre fiction writers with overlapping genre expertise and familiarity with more recent genre fiction. I’m no longer asked to explain a genre, or to explain a secondary world in great detail at the start of a story. This has made the difference between feeling uncertain about a piece after submitting it to the larger group, and feeling excited to improve the same piece after receiving precise and knowledgeable feedback from the small group.

I miss the social space of the old group. I enjoyed the people, and I did receive some useful responses. But this smaller group is so much better at delivering what I want from a critique group, there’s no way I’d go back.

It’s a good enough group experience, in fact, that I’m tempted to invite another writer whose critique has been transformative for me previously. At the same time, I fear adding more people—every additional writer dilutes our ability to respond to everyone every session. I’ll have to talk this over with my friends and see how they feel.