Writing Dates: A Wonderful Habit to Start

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The concept of a writing date is not universally known. But it should be.

I think my circle of writer friends coined it in college. Sometimes, we got together and wrote. Sometimes we discussed writing or bounced ideas, or shared work – either as show-and-tell or a request fro help.

Writing dates aren’t NaNo-style write-ins, or a writing salon full of discussion, or a critique group, but a mutable, malleable amalgam of all three. Whatever is most needed in the moment.

What makes it a date? We get out. Break up the routine. Go to a coffee shop or restaurant. Or go to a museum, or zoo, or park – make it a fill-the-well kind of writing date. Sometimes I need to do these things alone, but sometimes I need to make myself accountable to someone outside myself.

And sometimes when I need to fill the well or do location research, having more perspectives and more sets of eyes can only help.

I’ve had too few writing dates since moving back to Maine. (Has it really been almost six years?) Schedules and distance have been a major factor. Needing to make new writer-firends who don’t live hundreds or thousands of miles away have been another.

Recently, I tossed the idea out on Facebook and it received a pretty great response. So I created a group – an informal thing to make forming a writing date easier. Rather than getting held up by logistics in planning a date, we can post with where we’ll be, when, and everyone else can let us know if they’ll make it or not.

The goal is to take the hard part – getting started – out of the equation. I’ve wanted to do this for years. Here’s hoping it works!

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