Best Online Writing Communities: How to Find Your Writers Group

The best online writing communities connect you to the literary world at large, supporting your craft and creativity while helping your voice be heard. At the same time, the internet is a gigantic place, and it can be hard to find spaces that will uplift your writing and introduce you to other writers. 

This article helps you find the best online writing community for your own writing needs. We’ll walk you through what good communities include, how to show up in the communities you join, and what we’ve learned from running the Writers.com online writing community. 

But first: what are the best online writing communities? Here’s an overview of what we’ve found on the internet. 

The Best Online Writing Communities in 2025

Here are the best online writing communities we’ve discovered around the internet. We define these communities as being spaces where writers can congregate, share their work, learn from one another, and forge the kinds of friendships and connections that sustain a writing life. 

Writers.com 

We started the Writers.com community with one mission: to share and celebrate our writing with one another. Our members meet several times a week to learn from one another and improve their writing together. In addition to Zoom writing sessions, we also have weekly and monthly instructor-led workshops and an online community space to explore our writing journeys together. 

• Includes:
  • Regular writing prompts
  • Biweekly Zoom writing sessions
  • Instructor-led workshops 
  • Free on-demand craft lectures 
  • An online meeting space to share and celebrate your work 
• Best For: Writers of all genres, in any stage of your writing journey.
• Learn More: Membership is only $47/month. Sign up for a one-week free trial here.

The Community has been everything I hoped it would be. I thoroughly enjoy the Write-Ins and craft explorations. I have enjoyed getting to know the staff and other community members and their writing—it brings a personal touch to my writing journey that wasn’t there before. Thank you so much!

—Lola Willis, Writers.com Community member

Sustenance 

Sustenance is the brainchild of poet Joy Sullivan. Members get access to a full library of previous Zoom workshops, plus attendance in regularly scheduled workshops with working, professional writers. Members also get opportunities to workshop their writing with each other in an encouraging community space. 

• Includes: 
  • Access to a library of recorded workshops
  • Attendance to regularly scheduled workshops with professional writers
  • An online community space to share and workshop writing
• Best For: Poets and lyric essayists looking to write and publish new work. 
• Learn More: Annual subscriptions currently run for $1600. Sustenance is currently on a waiting list. You can join the waiting list here. 

Paragraph

Based in NYC but with writers all around the world, Paragraph is an online writing community for serious working writers. It was founded by MFA graduates who were lacking for community spaces outside of the university, and it has since grown into a robust online platform with regular workshops and critique groups. 

• Includes: 
  • Free access to craft talks, roundtables, and query pitch workshops, including recordings of past events. . 
  • Discounts on creative writing classes
  • Access to online discussion boards. 
  • Monthly critique groups in all genres (except poetry). 
• Best For: Writers serious about improving their craft and working towards publication. 
• Learn More: Membership is currently only $25/month. You can join here. 

Scribophile

Scribophile is an online writing community primarily for fiction writers. The site hosts many different opportunities for writers to connect, get feedback, and learn from each other, and their community is both free to join and offers paid subscriber perks. 

• Includes: 
  • A forum to share work and receive feedback on novels-in-progress. 
  • Access to community writing contests.
  • Access to a directory of beta readers (paid). 
  • Detailed reader statistics for all work uploaded to the community (paid).  
• Best For: Novelists of all genres and backgrounds. 
• Learn More: Learn more about membership options here: the paid option costs $15/month. 

Shut Up & Write!

Shut Up & Write! is an international, decentralized writing community that hosts events both online and in cities around the world. Writers congregate in timed writing sessions to focus on their work, and sometimes hang out afterwards to connect and build community with one another. 

If you don’t have a Shut Up & Write! community where you live, they have resources for helping you start one yourself!

• Includes: 
  • Regularly scheduled sessions to focus on your writing. 
  • An online archive of tips and resources for writing craft.
  • Help in starting your own community if it doesn’t already exist. 
• Best For: Writers of all genres looking to build local community, including local online writing community.
• Learn More: Membership is free! Learn more here. 

Pen Parentis

Pen Parentis is an online writing community designed specifically for writers who are raising families. The community offers tailored benefits to help writers juggle their writing projects with the daily tasks that childcare requires. 

• Includes: 
  • Regular newsletters, lifestyle tips, and resources for writers balancing many obligations. 
  • An online writing community to connect with other writer-parents. 
  • Accountability groups and other opportunities to focus on your work. 
• Best For: Writers of all genres who are trying to balance childcare with the demands of their writing projects. 
• Learn More: Membership is free, with paid options. NYC-based writers also occasionally have access to in-person events. Learn more here!

London Writers’ Salon

Don’t be fooled by the name—London Writers’ Salon is an international online writing community that regularly congregates to get words on the page. In addition to daily Zoom calls, LWS offers classes, options for editorial feedback, and ongoing writing opportunities. 

• Includes: 
  • Daily Zoom-based writing sessions to focus exclusively on your writing projects. 
  • Ongoing learning opportunities, including classes and paid editorial feedback. 
  • Options to connect with agents, experts, and professional writers. 
  • Paid access to accountability groups, expert Zoom recordings, and e-books on writing craft. 
• Best For: Writers of all genres looking to focus on their work, especially fiction and nonfiction writers. 
• Learn More: Get details on free and paid membership opportunities here. 

Your Local Library

We’ll make an honorable mention of your local library. Many libraries have online and in-person writing groups; they’re often the best community spaces to host communities like this. If you find that your library doesn’t offer this, consider starting a writing group yourself!

Social Media

Social media is also a place where writers sometimes congregate. It doesn’t offer the same level of accountability as Zoom-based writing workshops, and since social media is often unmoderated, you run the risk of encountering writers who aren’t kind or supportive. 

That said, different sites offer different text-based platforms that are useful for meeting writers, especially if you live in a part of the world that doesn’t have much in the way of community. Reddit offers different forums, like r/writers, where folks can post about their writing anxieties or learn more about the craft. Tumblr (yes, it’s still around!) is also a place where writers congregate, post their work, and celebrate the craft. 

There are also websites like Archive of Our Own (great for fanfiction writers) and Wattpad that are designed for sharing work, getting feedback, and building community. 

Find More Online Writing Communities at the Poets & Writers Database

Lastly, Poets & Writers has a great directory of in-person and online writing communities that you can explore. The directory is occasionally out-of-date, but it includes groups for writers of all genres, abilities, and identities. 

Learn more here!

Features of the Best Online Writing Communities

The best online writing communities have these features in common:

• Supportive: Writing comes with its own anxieties and difficulties. The best online writing communities meet you at your needs, inspire confidence, and help you rise to the occasion of your own work. 
• Generative: Some online writing communities include prompted writing sessions; others simply carve out time for you to work on your own projects. Regardless, finding time and space to focus on your own writing is hard, and communities help create that time and space for you. 
• Educational: Every writer has something to offer. Yes, even complete newbies. In constructive writing spaces, writers learn from one another, offer feedback, and educate each other to become better authors. 
• Inspiring: You should come away from any writing space you join feeling inspired—whether that means inspiration for new goals, or inspiration to continue writing your own long-term projects. 
• Accessible and Inclusive: The creative writing world sometimes has a reputation for being closed off or elitist—and it’s true that some communities are exclusionary. We’ve found that the best online writing communities do not arbitrarily exclude any writers from their ranks, so long as all writers are willing to show up, be kind, and support one another in their work. 
• Connected: Writers also have a reputation for being introverted. But, even in the most introspective spaces, good online writing communities foster connection and friendship. Even if those are only friends you connect with over Zoom and email, you should still feel excited to write alongside other community members, and feel as though you know other writers whom you can mutually support.  

We recommend the above online writing communities for meeting all of these qualities. Whatever your writing needs are, you are sure to come away connected, engaged, and inspired to complete your own writing projects. 

How You Should Show Up in Online Writing Communities

While the best online writing communities exist to support your writing, learning, and community needs, it’s important that you also show up to any space with the right mindset and attitude. The more you invest into a community, the more you will get out of it—and we have a few tips on this based on our own experiences both building and participating in communities around the internet. 

1. Be Open Minded

One beautiful opportunity in any thriving community is the chance to learn about new and different lived experiences. Writers transcend all backgrounds, ideologies, and walks of life, and our task is to both understand ourselves and the world around us. Online writing communities are the perfect places for this—but only if you enter into one with an open mind. 

Online writing communities are the perfect places to understand ourselves and the world around us. 

Be willing to engage with people whose perspectives and experiences you don’t understand or initially disagree with. Disagreement and discomfort is not inherently a sign of danger. If anything, a community that operates as an echo chamber is far more dangerous, as it quells dissent and closes opportunities for growth and engagement. 

The vast majority of communities contain little to no friction, but the human experience is wide and diverse; if this happens, see this as an opportunity for connection and understanding, and you might find yourself forging deeper connections you would have otherwise foregone. 

2. Listen More Than You Speak

All writers want to be heard, and many writers join communities so others can hear them. You may very well join for the same reason. So this advice may be counterintuitive, but hear us out: you should try to listen more than you speak. 

Great communities are fostered when its members closely engage with one another’s thoughts, feelings, and writings.

Great communities are fostered when its members closely engage with one another’s thoughts, feelings, and writings. Community building is a two-way street: it requires both hearing and being heard. If you are 1 person in a room of 10 people, you shouldn’t speak much more than 1/10 of the time; otherwise, you might start losing opportunities to learn from other members, and for them to hear you, too. 

Don’t think about this advice too deeply—certainly, do not time yourself every time you open your mouth. But, great communities are fostered when everyone takes turns sharing their work, and it can often be more rewarding to hear someone name their own experiences: it creates new doorways for connection, and allows you to share yourself more freely as well. 

3. Know That Every Writer Has a Different Journey

Some of us write poetry; others, fiction, nonfiction, drama, etc. 

Some of us have been writing for 40+ years and have Ph.Ds. Others are relatively new to writing. 

Some of us write in the Modernist vein; others are Postmodern. 

Some writers want to publish their sixth novel; others want to self-publish their first poetry collection; still others don’t plan on publishing at all.

The best online writing communities accommodate for the beautiful diversity of the writer’s path.

Every writer is on a different journey. The best online writing communities accommodate for the beautiful diversity of the writer’s path. Do not assume anything about anyone else’s journey, and don’t expect others to automatically get yours, either. The more you learn about other peoples’ writing lives, the more you might learn about your own, and what you want to achieve in your work. 

4. Celebrate All Successes

Writing is a lonely business. We come to community to lessen that loneliness. And one of the easiest ways to do this is to share and celebrate all successes. Keep this mindset in mind with both your own successes and others’. 

When other people share successes, engage with them and congratulate them on what they’ve accomplished. This is true whether the success is a publication, a breakthrough in their work, or even just making the time to sit down and write for 5 minutes. If someone shares a win they’re celebrating, celebrate it with them. And, if you ever find yourself feeling jealous or insecure about your own accomplishments, remember that writing is not a zero sum game: we are not competing against each other, and a high tide rises all boats.

When other people share successes, engage with them and congratulate them on what they’ve accomplished. Be in the habit of sharing your own successes as well, however small they may seem.

Be in the habit of sharing your own successes as well, however small they may seem. Don’t pooh-pooh what you accomplish. The more you share about your own journey and success, the more others will encourage you to keep going, and the better it feels to write and be writing with a supportive community. 

5. See Yourself as a Member, Not a Participant

You do not need permission to be a part of an online writing community.

Read that again.

You do not need permission. Don’t wait for someone to tell you that it’s okay to join, to participate, to be with other writers. 

It can be so easy to exclude yourself from a writing space. The excuses never end. Everyone is already friends with everyone, why do they need me? You might ask. Or, I don’t have anything of value to contribute, why should I join?

Everyone has something of value to contribute, including you.

You should join because those moments of hesitation are simply untrue. Everyone has something of value to contribute, including you. Even if you are new to writing, or haven’t read as many books, or don’t feel like you belong. You are a writer, you do contribute (just by being present!), and you deserve to have a community that supports and encourages you.

Any writing space that doesn’t make you feel seen or accepted is not worth your time. If someone tells you to ask for permission, run—successful writing communities do not demand any proof of worthiness, as you are already worthy. 

You do not need permission to be a part of an online writing community.

What We’ve Learned from Being Part of Online Writing Communities

Here are some thoughts from the Writers.com administrative team about how online writing communities have transformed our writing. 

Frederick Meyer: Online Writing Communities Transform Your Learning

Running the Writers.com community has exposed me to things that I wouldn’t have run into otherwise. 

For example, I got really into doing erasure poems because of a community member’s suggestion, and I wrote a couple of the poems that I’m happiest with that way. I wouldn’t even be writing poetry at all if I wasn’t part of this space. 

I wouldn’t even be writing poetry at all if I wasn’t part of this space.

When I look at a piece of published writing in the community, I really get a much deeper sense of it. I see a lot of perspectives. We looked at this poem set in a mid-20th century house that had a mother and a few children and then the father was always traveling and he was kind of like this distant presence, and they were talking about what it was like doing chores all day and waiting for any news from the outside world. And you know, the poem hit me however it hit me. And then people were talking about what their experience was like, you know, growing up in parts of the world that were similar, parts that were different. And by the end of it, I just felt like I understood the poem so much better and it really resonated with me in a different way. 

It’s very much this mind meld when reading poems. And you get like this entire kaleidoscope of perspectives on it.

I feel like people’s comments on my writing have always been constructive and also have pointed to the parts of the writing that aren’t satisfying with a lot of accuracy. I’ve really appreciated that, and it causes you to engage with the writing that other people like or, in my case, since I’m helping organize it, it’s something on my calendar where I’m going to be really prioritizing writing and literature with a group of people that I really trust and that I really like. 

it’s something on my calendar where I’m going to be really prioritizing writing and literature with a group of people that I really trust and that I really like.

So it’s been really rewarding and a lot of the time it’s oddly therapeutic. It’s been quite therapeutic on a number of occasions and some people have been very, very kind to me in various ways. That is one of those things that I don’t really know that I need in a way. So it’s been a really rich experience. I’m really glad to be doing it and I recommend it to anybody. 

It’s one of those things that I don’t really know that I need in a way.

—Frederick Meyer, Writers.com Director

Elle LaMarca: Online Writing Communities Transform Your Writing Life

I met my critique partner of 15 years in my first online creative writing course. So although that’s not specifically about a community, I think the idea of taking an online writing course as a way to start building your community is so beneficial. If you find people that you really connect with, how you read each other’s work, that can be the foundation of your own community. I still work with this person on a weekly basis, and it’s now been 15 years.

I always feel more motivated and more inspired to write my own work when I’m inside a community.

In my experience, as someone who’s been a part of several different writing communities, writing can often feel so lonely because you have to do the work and that doesn’t change. Like, you have to write the words yourself, but I always feel more motivated and more inspired to write my own work when I’m inside a community and I’m reading other people’s work, and I’m hearing about their experiences and their journeys as writers. That’s true whether I’m leading the community or just an active participant. Being around other writers physically or even online is motivating and I always write more. 

—Elle LaMarca, Writers.com Curriculum Specialist

Join the Writers.com Online Writing Community!

Your voice is a gift. Share it in the online writing community at Writers.com. All voices, perspectives, and ideas are respected and valued in our community of writers around the globe, and your presence will only make us stronger. 

Learn more here!