Ways to Socialize Online with Your Writers Group That Don’t Involve Critiquing Each Other’s Stories

As social isolation continues, more and more of us are becoming adept with using Zoom for videocalls. It’s been the platform that my school uses for the past year, and one thing I’ve done is introduce various community events. Such events have become my main way of socializing, in fact, and I’ve really enjoyed getting to know people over the course of calls, with moments like seeing someone’s sleeping partner being woken by their cat in the background or a child stealthily peeping around a doorway, as well as a chance to see what backgrounds people choose to amuse and express themselves.

Zoom is well suited to the size of most writers groups, in my opinion. The functionality allows you to control the flow of conversation and not have everyone talking over everyone else. You can screen share if you want to show people something, and people can private message back and forth if they want to do the equivalent of whispering. And the nice thing is that you can do a lot more than just critiquing each other’s stories. Here’s some possibilities.

How We Currently Use It

The by far most popular thing I have done is establish daily co-working sessions. I’ve talked about how run them productively elsewhere, but the basics are to have an…