WRITERS' GROUPS AND SOCIETIES
Derbyshire - Leicestershire
& Rutland - Lincolnshire - Northamptonshire
- Nottinghamshire
Out of the Twilight Zone
To go to a writers' workshop/group for the first time takes guts. Your precious little words, shining lines, glittering sentences are going to be taken from their padlocked box and shown to strangers. You are going to squirm as they paw at your personal and private utterances and sweat when they begin to probe your innermost thoughts. AAAARRRGGHH! You might rightly say. Worst of all, if you are honest and not some kind of prodigy, you are going to learn that the majority of your stuff is dustbin fodder. Oh yes! Go ahead, tell yourself you're perfect, but until you lift that mirror you'll never really know.
Anyway, all this doesn't matter once you've made that first brave but essential step. You'll have taken the cotton-wool out of your ears and will be receiving messages loud and clear. You'll be getting feedback, criticism, advice, an audience, a sense of belonging and a glorious chance to rattle on, ad infinitum, about the problems and niggles that send normal non-writers into a deep but troubled sleep. It is also so much better to have your work aired at an early stage when you have the will and energy to change it, than to go on alone bouncing your babies off publisher's granite walls, losing faith with every rejection slip. The workshop that I helped to found and still attend in Nottingham, has been running for seven years. The number of writers that come and go is phenomenal, so the character of the workshop changes from week to week. To me this is great. New people every time, new ideas, new kinds of criticism and the regular chance to read your own stuff to a live audience at the weekly meeting or at organised readings. What better way for a new writer to feel their muscles, to examine their strengths and weaknesses and to find their own voice?
Listening to someone else's work can also help you a lot, even if it's only: "Good God! This is awful! I must remember never to write like this!" Or maybe: "Blimey, she can write! I must go through my stuff - sharpen it up a bit". It's all valuable experience that you won't find so intensely anywhere else. So writers groups fulfil a need. They should and could be whatever you want them to be. Maybe it's time to get yourself and your words out of the twilight zone. Maybe it's time to use them!
Pete Hannah
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