Most writing groups are useless. The blind leading the blind.

Unpublished writers pontificating on each other's work. Great. That's just what you need as an unpublished writer floundering about and trying to catch clues.

Anybody else watch The Deadliest Catch? Can you believe they're doing a video game? Wow.

I'm not digressing, I'm about to make a point. (Come on, you've got to learn to tell the difference between my tangential digressions and clever teaching tactics.) (And when you figure it out, let me in on the secret.)

Anyway -- at one point in the commercial, Sig Hansen turns to the camera and says, "Shut up and fish."

That's what you need to know about writing groups.

MOST groups -- and I say most because I have run across a few decent ones -- are full of rules about finding something positive to say before offering criticism, about supportive and enriching learning environments, about nurturing the genius within each of us.... Big sigh. Shut up and fish.

In commercial fiction, there are rules. If you're brilliant, you can break them. Odds are, you are not brilliant because if you were, you wouldn't be asked and your drafts would not suck so badly.

Unpublished writers don't understand the rules. That's why they're unpublished. That's why they have ZERO publishing credits in ANYTHING at all, even articles in the local paper.

If they're too arrogant to listen or figure out the rules themselves, they stay unpublished. If they're teachable, they recognize the truth when they hear it and they learn.

One thing I do fairly often is tell people that something doesn't work. Or that it sounds stupid. The people who will make it as writers are those who can understand, after a little reflexive bristling, that comments about their writings are not comments about their characters. It's like saying a board is hammered in crookedly or that the rice is burnt. There's no place for nurturing precious inner children in this world that most novice writers think they want to enter.

Digression: be very cautious about deciding someone is not teachable. It's very easy to be wrong about this. Not wrong about whether his or her writing sucks -- I'm always right about that. But I personally have been wrong about who is teachable and who is not, and I would like to ENCOURAGE you -- if you're ever in the position to teach, and you shouldn't be, if you're still unpublished -- to hold off on deciding who is teachable and who is not. In particular, I have found that if a person has played team sports at a fairly high level, e.g. college ball, pro ball -- they probably have some teachable genes. Now, they may be ignorant about the rules. That's okay. We can fix ignorance. Give team sports players a chance.