In April of 2014 I was coming out of the daze that was the first three years of my twin sons’ lives. A whirlwind of diapers, first steps and snuggles all while trying to keep up with their sister, three years their senior. I hadn’t made much time for writing over that time and I began to realize what a void that had created. I needed to find that spark again.
Finally ready to make writing a priority again, I went in search of a writing group to help me do it. I pored over Meetup, but I hit a wall. Hard. Finding groups wasn’t my problem, being just outside L.A. there were plenty. My challenge was that each group I found was a critique based group. Which meant they wanted me to write something in advance, submit it to the group and show up once a week to take and give critique.
Here’s my problem with that type of writing environment. First, there’s homework. Getting my kid’s homework done is hard enough, I didn’t have time for homework of my own. Second, I hadn’t really sat down and written anything new in years. Years. I wasn’t ready for someone to be judging my creaky words, constructively or otherwise. I realized that what I really needed was a creative writing group. A collection of like-minded people to show up once a week and create something new. To my surprise, there weren’t any.
In a moment of clarity, my husband reached through my haze of frustration and casually suggested I start my own group. Light bulb! It was so crazy it just might work! I went on Meetup.com and instead of beating my head against a firewall I created the group I needed. Being straight forward I named the group ‘Write It Up!’ because that’s exactly what I intended to do. I set it up so it would meet every other Wednesday and figured that even if no one else showed up, at least I would be setting aside time to write something new every other week myself.
Our first meeting came two weeks later on May 8th, 2014 and to my surprise I wasn’t alone! There were five of us that night. Two weeks later there were eight! We averaged 6-8 writers each week while we figured out what worked for us as we tried different prompt styles. When we got to January of 2015 we began meeting every Wednesday night and had settled into a prompt style that worked for us.
Our group was always fluctuating as new writers found us and tried us out, but the backbone of our group was the talented and supportive writers that joined us regularly sharing their talent and perspective. May 2017 marked three years that we have been writing together and I have to say that my writing has grown by leaps and bounds in that time simply from the exercise of writing regularly and the exposure to so many different writing styles and voices.
I love each and every week, getting to sit down with my fellow writers in an environment that is nurturing, encouraging and challenging as we get to know ourselves as writers.
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