How To Run A Virtual Writers’ Group

If your writing group normally gets together in person you might be thinking about jumping on Zoom or Google or WebEx to run your group virtually.

I’ve been running an online writing challenge since 2010 and have run live video meetings at least once a month since 2018. I’m going to share with you some tips, some lessons learned a big helping of: just do it!

1. Don’t Worry, Be Crappy

If you’re worried about ‘getting it right’, stop.

Right now is the best time to experiment. Everyone is forgiving of amateurism, blundering, and ineptitude in the face of unfamiliar technology. Everyone is appreciative of someone trying to make life better for them.

You will mess up. You will have to say ‘oops’, and ‘er’ and ‘does anyone know how to turn off screen sharing?’. Chances are someone in your group will know, or help you figure it out.

Being together is worth it.

2. Structure Your Meetings

Be respectful of people’s time. Tell them when the meeting will start and end. Tell them the structure.

If you’re getting together to do writing sprints, here’s what I do:

• Before we start work, we assemble and chat for a few minutes. I lay out the ground rules for the meeting and tell them where to find the text chat box, and whether or not the meeting is being recorded.
• I might ask ‘what are you planning on working on today?’, but I don’t force anyone to answer. Some people are deeply uneasy with being on camera or talking in a group, so I don’t force them to. I invite them to keep their camera off until they’re comfortable (but often people turn them on later in the meeting and it really does help). I also invite them to share their comments in the chat box if they’re not comfortable on the microphone.
• Then I announce that we’re starting a sprint and how long it will be. In the chat box I type “SPRINTING UNTIL :15” (for example. I don’t put the hour before the colon because people are in different time zones for me) in case anyone arrives during the sprint and wonders what’s going on.
• During the sprints I mute everyone’s microphones so nobody is disturbed.
• At the end of the sprint I unmute myself only, announce the end of the sprint and ask everyone how they got on. They can share word counts or page counts or how much organizing they got done or whatever. (I let them unmute themselves selectively during the session).
• When the conversation dies down (or when 5 minutes have passed, which ever comes first) I announce another sprint and repeat the process.
• My sessions go for 90 minutes which allows for a decent amount of chatting and 3–4 15 minute sprints.
• At the end of the last sprint I unmute everyone (having warned them at the beginning I’m going to do this — they can remain muted on their end if they prefer) so that we can have a final chat and say goodbye.

You can run your writing sprints for longer if you like (20 min, 30 mins, I know someone who does 45 minute sprints and 15 minutes of chatting, but that might be a bit long if you’re just starting this)

For a Critique Group, where you’re sharing work, it’s going to be even more important to have someone on time-keeper duty.

(If you want me to write up how I run my Critique Group, let me know and I’ll do that as a separate article)

3. Have — or be — a leader

Even if your meeting is informal, you are the host. If you want people to enjoy themselves it helps to have some kind of structure. Have some conversation starter questions ready, or a full-on schedule of events (like my Sprints structure, above) and explain it all at the start of the meeting.

Tell people how long the meeting will last, and stick to your schedule. Respect people’s time.

If you’re doing more than one meeting, start every meeting on time. That will train people to turn up on time and respect the time of those who do.

Think of it like a virtual party. Make sure you welcome people (either as a group or individually) and set everyone at ease by explaining how things are going to work.

Don’t be afraid to interrupt someone who is hogging the microphone and move the conversation along. You want everyone to enjoy this meeting, right?

Thank everyone for coming.

Bonus points: send an email afterwards asking people how they thought the meeting went, what went well and what could be done differently next time to make it even better.

4. Security

If you know and trust everyone in your group and are a, requiring registration/passwords or b, only sharing the meeting link with people you trust, you can ignore this section, or just file away the information for future reference.

(Unless you’re doing promotional work where it serves you to make the meeting links public, I highly recommend NOT making the links public.)

If your links are public, you’ll need to lock down some features in your video conferencing software to make sure you stay in control. I can only speak for Zoom, but here’s what I do, to ensure nobody can come in and create mischief during my meetings. (These settings are all found in Zoom, here)

• Have a community standards document. I recommend this template.
• Disable the feature that allows participants to join before the host
• Turn off screen sharing or set it to ‘host only’
• Disable ‘virtual backgrounds’
• Disable the ‘white board’ feature
• Disable 1:1 messaging during the call. Only allow participants to message ‘everyone and host’. That way you, or someone on your team can monitor all comments in the chat box and be sure nobody is being harassed.
• Familiarize yourself with the ‘Manage Participants’ controls, that allow you to mute and remove rogue elements.

5. Send Reminders

Even if you run this meeting at the same time everyday, send reminders (allowing people to unsubscribe from the announcements).

It may seem inconceivable to you, who have put so much time and thought into this, that people will forget, but people are busy, forgetful, overwhelmed, distractible, in other words, human.

• Set automatic reminders in a program like Mailchimp or Convertkit, or send group texts (but please offer people a way to opt out!),
• Or manually send a reminder 60–15 minutes before the meeting starts. Include the link to the meeting (again) in this message.
• You can provide a Google calendar people can subscribe to but, depending on the digital sophistication of your group that won’t always work.

To guarantee the best attendance, be consistent about reminding people right before the meeting.

In Conclusion

You can do this. People will appreciate you being bold and taking the lead.

It takes some practice to find out what works best for your group. Be open to feedback, but don’t agree to anything YOU don’t want to do. (You can always invite people to run their own meetings, their own way, if they don’t like yours. Nicely.)

Don’t worry about making mistakes. Be open and generous. People will remember the parts that went well and how good you made them feel, for far longer than they will remember anything that went wrong (unless it was legendary, in which case it’s probably worth it for the material!)

Take a chance. Extend a hand. You (probably) won’t regret it.

Questions? Let me know.