Heidi Fisk's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing-club-style"
Old Wrting Groups
This is always funny to talk about, but I once belonged to a alright sized writing group a year or two ago. It wasn't bad, and I don't have too many horror stories to tell about them besides a few high strung writers.
More it's a story about how I ended up drifting away from them and going my own route. Not in a too negative way, more that what they thought about writing and how I saw it was very different.
I believed that you should try to make your story or book as best as you possibly can at the moment and sitting on it too long may actually lessen the quality of it.
I have scrapped many stories before, and that's not me being negative, it's more that I ditched them and took pieces and ideas from them to use or simpler or more complex works.
Legends Now and Then was one of them, and while I enjoyed writing that story, even I could see at the moment not only did I like the skill to write something so large. I also needed to look at how I would write it when I went back to it.
However, I am happy I finished it and published it when I did even if I ended up removing it later. Since it acted as a stepping stone to projects.
This was really what caused friction in the group...no one really finished anything. They ended up scrapping and rewriting over and over again, asking people to read from chapter to chapter etc. Before they ended up just ditching the story.
This made it extremely difficult to actually talk about ideas and concepts, combined that with how some people viewed people doing it differently and I just kind of fell out of it.
It pretty much got to the point where being with the group actively hurt both my desire to write and ate up my time not really doing anything.
I wouldn't call them toxic, more that near the end we never talked about writing and I didn't have enough in common outside of that for me to want to continue the relationship.
So I ended up leaving, I don't regret it at all. I ended up meeting a group of friends that while not completely focus on writing like to talk about storytelling etc.
More it's a story about how I ended up drifting away from them and going my own route. Not in a too negative way, more that what they thought about writing and how I saw it was very different.
I believed that you should try to make your story or book as best as you possibly can at the moment and sitting on it too long may actually lessen the quality of it.
I have scrapped many stories before, and that's not me being negative, it's more that I ditched them and took pieces and ideas from them to use or simpler or more complex works.
Legends Now and Then was one of them, and while I enjoyed writing that story, even I could see at the moment not only did I like the skill to write something so large. I also needed to look at how I would write it when I went back to it.
However, I am happy I finished it and published it when I did even if I ended up removing it later. Since it acted as a stepping stone to projects.
This was really what caused friction in the group...no one really finished anything. They ended up scrapping and rewriting over and over again, asking people to read from chapter to chapter etc. Before they ended up just ditching the story.
This made it extremely difficult to actually talk about ideas and concepts, combined that with how some people viewed people doing it differently and I just kind of fell out of it.
It pretty much got to the point where being with the group actively hurt both my desire to write and ate up my time not really doing anything.
I wouldn't call them toxic, more that near the end we never talked about writing and I didn't have enough in common outside of that for me to want to continue the relationship.
So I ended up leaving, I don't regret it at all. I ended up meeting a group of friends that while not completely focus on writing like to talk about storytelling etc.
