Saving my writing life

Sometimes we use these at writing group

If I say that my writing group has saved my writing life, does that seem an exaggeration? Maybe, but it certainly has kept me writing through the dark days with lots of laughter and support.

I joined around spring time this year after my previous writing group finished, but if I am honest I had not been gaining much from it for a while and had found myself looking for excuses not to go. At the point of its demise I nearly gave up writing completely. I'd had a tough few years and nothing seemed to improving. Yet something made me look at Meet-Up and see what they could offer in the way of a writing group that was easy to get to and wasn't a trip in some dark part of London in the evening.

And I found them. We meet in the afternoons in a cafe by the River Thames in Hammersmith. It is a bit of a trek for me (a bus and two tubes), but I decided after my first time there that this was just what I needed. There is now a core group of around 4 or 5 and we meet weekly. Our leader always gives us a theme in advance (today's is fireworks!) and then we begin with timed free writing starting with one minuted right up to twenty minutes. We read back what we have if we want to. There's no pressure. There is a random word piece where  turns are taken to read while the others write. This is my favourite part.We break half way through for refreshments and then there is a poem to read on the theme before we go into our longer piece. Before we finish we do the game! We each write a paragraph to begin a story and then pass it round for the next person to add the next section. Once everyone has done that we read it back. It makes for some hilarious reading.

What this group has done for me is to help me find the fun and enjoyment in writing again. Nothing is being submitted anywhere and it frees my mind to write what I want, though on the spur of the moment like these exercises are  there's no time to think about it and one is restricted by time, theme and words. It works for me.

Without this group I may well have stopped writing. It's filling a need to be creative without the thought of the rejection email and the 'not quite the right fit' scenario I've been dealing with for an age. I am enjoying my poetry but I can see by my submissions book that I sent out one thing last month and I have to say halfheartedly. I don't know where my writing will take me in the future, but at least this lovely friendly group is a delight to be part of.

Here is a random word piece from a free-writing session.
I have highlighted the words we were given as we wrote (fitting them in is always so much fun.) This has had no editing and often they don't quite make sense!

She looked mockingly at the wheelchair in the hall as she shuffled through on her walking frame. The antique bowl on the telephone table reminded her of the day her husband had left in an explosion of words like the explosion of colour on the bowl -ranting and raving. She wished she had a wishing chair that day so she could have wished him away, all that cuteness he seemed to possess, that nit picking, like the 'bar stool is not a chair'. Everything with him was like a bus going uphill, straining on the gears. He'd never been a supportive husband. If only she'd had wings. Now she needed a wheelchair. If only it was made of Lego she could dismantle it.

Inspirational Writing Groups and still searching for the 'right fit' submission

Photo: Columbus Square, Canary Wharf

Recently I had the nicest rejection letter I have ever received from a magazine in the USA. I almost felt it was an acceptance! They praised one particular poem and said that they believed in the power of my writing and encouraged me to submit again in the coming months and years.

It took me a while to come down from that, yet I still struggle with this 'right fit' business. I do study magazines and choose the poem or poems I feel will sit well within it. Yet time and time again I get the same reply. It's easy to see where my poems don't fit, but much harder to find a magazine willing to publish me. It's frustrating.

Meanwhile, the writing group I've been attending for the last few years is having a break until September. The group leader has been unable to lead or attend in the past few months. Numbers have dwindled and the format of the group has not worked for me for a while.  So after the last time in which two of us just socialised there was a brief moment when I wondered whether now was the time to give up. Nothing has been working for a long time and it seemed like this was another nail in the coffin of writing.

But something changed. I had challenged myself to write a poem a day for a year and that was going quite well, but I needed inspiration, new ideas. I began searching for writing groups in my area. Nothing. I found myself on the Meet-Up website and while there were lots of groups in London, most met in pubs at night and crossing London late at night on my own is not something I want to do. Also finding the right group can be hit and miss. For me I think I've been lucky this time. I have found a group that meets in Hammersmith on a Saturday afternoon in a cafe. It's a bit of a trek but doable. So two weeks ago I went along. It was the right choice. We did two hours of free writing with timed sessions and random word exercises. We were encouraged to feedback our work, but it's not obligatory. I came away inspired and with ideas I was able to turn into poems. I went again yesterday afternoon, when the theme was decay. We were a larger group, all new people to me, and again I came away with a poem and the first few lines of a potential story. We laughed a lot and we wrote a lot. While we haven't done feedback on work we do outside of meetings, this is great for generating new ideas. This felt like a shot in the arm. A good one! It's always interesting to see how each of us in the group interprets the random words in a piece of writing. I love random words!

This morning I sat down to develop the potential short story. It's my first love story set in the dark ages! It's also the first new story I've written in some time.

Meanwhile the rejections keep coming and more and more I'm beginning to think that I might just go it alone and self-publish my work. Still, that's for the future, and certainly not this year.  For now I just want to enjoy my writing and try new things.