The most obvious form of writing community is a
writer’s group. A writer’s group is a great way to share your work, gather
information about publishing opportunities, celebrate small and large
triumphs, and commiserate about disappointments.
I’ve been in a poetry group in the San Francisco
Bay Area since 1987, when I first moved there. It’s called Thirteen Ways, named
partly for Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,”
and partly for the diversity of styles and aesthetics in the group. The membership has changed over two and half decades. We’ve stopped meeting for years at a
time, but there is a core of three of us who’ve been getting together for most
of the last twenty-five years.
We meet once a month on a Sunday afternoon. We
start off with a potluck, along with lots of juicy literary gossip and informal
exchange of information about where we’re sending our work these days. We share
our best quinoa recipes or the goodies we’ve bought. It’s social; it’s fun; the
food is delicious. That’s important in sustaining a group.
The work part of the group is a three-hour round
robin, where each member gets to read recent work. We all jump in and critique,
starting with positive comments. Then the sharks arrive. I don’t mind feeding
the sharks, as long as they don’t go for the jugular, since I am there to
improve my writing. If I get some strokes, I like the shark bites.
When we first started the group, only one member
had had a full-length manuscript published. By now, that’s true of every member
of the group. The list of awards the members have garnered is quite
impressive: the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry, the APR/Honickman First Book
Prize, the Poets Out Loud contest, the May Swenson first book prize, and a gift
certificate to a local yarn store. The last one was my award. I’m sure we would
have gotten those honors without the group (especially the yarn certificate), but
the writers group has certainly helped all of us grow as authors; polish our
work; and most importantly, stay in the game. We’ve also given numerous
readings together where we’ve shared our audiences. We trade information about
where to send work, which editors like what sort of work, reading
opportunities, favorite TV shows, etc.
It may not be convenient or comfortable for many
writers to be in a group like that. Novelists and prose writers in general need
to give other readers longer extracts in order to get meaningful feedback,
which creates some logistical problems in a writers group. But I do recommend
writers groups, provided that the company and the literary styles are
compatible. That’s a big “if.” I‘ve been in groups that didn’t click, because
one or two personalities dominated—often not the best writers in the group, by
the way. Like any partnership, it’s vital to have the right chemistry.
Community is important to writers for their
careers but it’s also one of the most fun things about being a writer. Many of
the most interesting people I’ve met in my life are writers. That is one great
pleasure of being part of this cadre of inspired misfits.
If the idea or the reality of a writer’s group
doesn’t work for you, there are other ways to be involved in a community of
writers. You can correspond with individual writers, connect via Facebook or
other social networks, or just mail or email manuscripts back and forth. Your community
can be a virtual one.
Speaking of virtual communities, I think writers
who create fictions—novels, stories, dramas—have a different type of community
that helps sustain them. In an odd way, I think your characters become a sort
of community. They move into your head, where they take the liberty of carrying
on their conversations and their fights with you as the witness—not paying a
dime of rent, by the way. They become a presence in your world. When you finish
a work, you miss their company. Novelists and playwrights can survive with less
community for this reason, I think. Maybe that’s part of why people write
novels and plays, to create that community in their imagination.
Other recent posts about writing topics:How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Other recent posts about writing topics:How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
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