I have belonged to exactly two writing groups in my life,
and I have been writing since elementary school (a Star Wars fanfic and a
largely plagiarized book on astronomy).
The first was in
college. I took a creative writing class with Wendy Barker
. She had a fanatical following among many of her creative writing students,
but I found the class off-putting and I was not the only one. I’m not going to
defend anything I wrote and shared during those painful meetings, but I had a
friend who wrote a gripping story about a woman who had an abortion (it was a
thinly veiled account of her own experiences) and I remember the complete
disinterest that the acolytes showed for it. I must admit also that I was not impressed by
Dr. Barker. My one clear memory of her was sitting in the hallway outside her
office having shown up for a scheduled meeting with her and waiting for 30
minutes or so while she and an acolyte shot the bull in her office, door open
and aware that I was waiting. In short, I never heard any genuinely useful
feedback in that class. That and the poetry voice that many of the students
used when reading their work convinced me I was not in the right place.
You know the poetry voice. It’s the voice that strives …
with highly artful … inflection … a rising tone … and meaningless … pauses … to
imbue ordinary thoughts … with great … philosophical … depth. I hate it. It’s
so false and, ironically, robs words of their power. It cheapens honest
emotion. The poetry voice is a major reason why I avoid public readings and writers’
groups.
The second writing group I was in was the San AntonioWriting Project
. This was, overall, a much better experience, but the focus here was making us
into better teachers of writing. And, honestly, I found the experience very
uncomfortable because I do not like reading my work out loud in a group
setting. And that’s on me. On several occasions
I was asked to reread something more slowly and louder because I had been in a
mad rush to get it over with. I did get
good feedback, honest critique, from some of my fellow participants, and I
loved having a designated time in which to write. It made me produce which was good because I am a lazy writer much of the time.
I guess, in a sense, I’ve been a member of another writers’
group. As a fanfiction
writer (former fanfiction writer?) and a beta reader I have gotten much better feedback from fellow writers than I ever did face
to face. The brutal honesty of some of
my fandom friends and the knowledge that they had gone through my writing line
by line really did improve my process and my output. This group has the added benefits of being
online and asynchronous so it wasn’t a matter of setting aside a particular
time to meet. And I never have to read my work out loud to anyone. The only
downside is that this group really only functions well when it comes to
fanfiction. Many of us write original
fiction but, at least for me, it’s more difficult to put the original fic out there
and have it go through that rigorous process.
I have tried a few times since then to start a writing
group, but people are busy, people are probably afraid I’ll read with the
poetry voice, people are shy, and people just aren’t interested.
And I have
toyed with the idea of joining an existing writers’ group … but I have so many
trust issues when it comes to opening my inner self up to other people. I am a
very private person when it comes to the things that matter most to me. My writing is intensely personal, probably the
most honest expression of who I imagine myself to be. The idea of sharing that
with a random group of strangers makes me feel sick. So, no, I probably won’t
be joining a preexisting writing group.
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