They say that “no man is an island.” But then again, “they”
say all sorts of trite, clichéd things. I may not be an island in the Webster’s
definition sense – I’m not a land mass surrounded on all sides by water – but
at times I feel island-ish. I work from home for my day job and I’m a single
dad with joint custody of the kids, which means if the weather is crappy (as it
frequently is in Central New York) I might go two or three days without leaving
the house or engaging in a face-to-face conversation. And I write. Could there
be a more solitary activity than sitting quietly in front of a computer screen,
clack-clack-clacking away?
(Driving a big rig, I suppose. Or being a lighthouse keeper.
Or a fire lookout like in that video game I’ve been meaning to check out.)
But as I mentioned in a previous post, I’m not the only
writer in this little town of mine. I met a couple during a storyslam event I
ran a couple years ago (think an informal version of The Moth) (Oh! Note to
self: Write a post about the storyslam), and a couple more at a charity event
thrown by the local library. It was cool to talk a bit of shop and hear about
other people’s projects.
It was at one of those events where another writer and I
started hatching the idea of a writers group.
(Writer’s group? Writers’ group? Unbeknownst to the others,
I’ve been wrestling with the punctuation for this for as long as the group has
been in existence. Go ahead and correct me in the comments.)
The idea was to form a small group of experienced writers who
can use each other as resources: give feedback on each other’s pieces and
leverage each other’s experiences when working through various writing
challenges. We finally got the ball rolling about a year ago, meeting at my
place every month for an hour or two.
It has been fantastic.
Currently there are five of us, and if two heads are better
than one then you can imagine how much better it is to have five heads. Our
collective writing backgrounds includes editing, journalism, research,
business writing, marketing and teaching at the college level. Between the five of us, we’re able to cover
almost all the bases: fiction and non-fiction, long-form and short-form,
self-published and under contract, and so on.
 |
| We're just like a tiamat, but without all the fangs and spikes and scales and collateral damage. |
As you can imagine, there’s a lot we can sort out by putting
our heads together. We regularly and swap stories of different events and
conferences to determine which was worth attending, and we’ve been able to talk
through common challenges such as marketing our writing out on the World Wide
Webs.
But for the most part, we read each other’s pieces. They’re
all great writers, so I really enjoy reading their stuff – I hope my feedback has
been helpful to them. It’s also been fascinating to see where everyone’s focus
is in terms of feedback, whether it’s on plot points, character arcs or line
edits.
Speaking of feedback, I was able to write “I can’t tell you
how valuable the group’s feedback on my story has been,” but that’s a
bald-faced lie: the group’s feedback on my story has been incredibly valuable,
making my work 100% better.
The previously featured C.T. Avis is one of the members of
our group, and you can look forward to other members being featured here. And I
can look forward to our next meeting, where I’ll receive the last bit of
feedback on my story. After that final round of revisions, we’re in uncharted
territory…
No comments:
Post a Comment