How do I know when I've outgrown my crit group?

So you’ve been with a crit group for a while, and all of a sudden you’re not feeling it anymore.

What’s a writer to do?

For the purposes of this article, we’re going to presume that for at least some period of time, your crit group was a good one that was serving your needs. (There are plenty of bad crit groups out there that start off bad. That’s easier to identify and bail out of than a crit group that isn’t bad at all, just no longer the right place for you to be as an artist.)

A good crit group produces a community, a club scene. Artists learn from each other, feed off each other in their growth, and create the kind of environment that fosters creativity. They kind of hothouse and accelerate each other, like musicians in a jam session pushing each other to play a little fancier.