Tonight was my first night attending a writing club. I’d heard of writing clubs before, but I’d never joined one. I hadn’t even known one in my area back in Nebraska. Moving to Washington has made me look at things a little differently. I started looking for ways to meet new people, and I happened to find two interests. One is a writing club which I attended for the first time tonight. The other is a book club that I haven’t had a chance to attend yet. But I loved the experience of the writing club.
We met at a Panera to have some drinks and share our writing. It was two-hour meeting. While we were there, we did a fun writing activity of a round robin writing. We all wrote for three minutes on a given topic (a modern-day Icarus), then we passed it to the person on our left. We continued in this fashion until we received our own back. Then we shared them all and had a great laugh about where each person had taken the story. It was interesting to see that some people really went the Icarus route with a true wish to fly. I took a different route and looked at Icarus as a metaphor. Instead of someone who wishes to fly, I saw it as a person who had achieved a lot and was about to take a hard fall. It was neat to see where my story went.
After we did this activity, we each shared a piece of our own writing. We read out loud while each person looked at a copy of our work. I was a little nervous about what the others would think of my writing, and I really wanted help figuring out how to take the writing somewhere. I have an idea for a novel that I think is really kind of unique, but I just can’t get my plot figured out. The group really gave me some great suggestions on how to flesh out my characters in the hopes that the story will come from their development. I’m really hopeful about that, and I’m very excited to do the activities they suggested. It was a great experience.
If you get the chance to join a writing club or set up a club, do it. I found mine through Meetup. I’m not sure if it costs anything to set up a group, but it doesn’t cost to join a group unless that particular group specifies a price. Sharing your writing with others is a great experience, and I think we sometimes needlessly suffer alone when we work on writing. Let the suffering be done.
Overcoming My Ink Monster 