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Starting a small writers' group - any ideas?
I'd like to start a small writers' group, about half a dozen at the most meeting in a local cafe. Totally informal. I used to belong to a large formal writers' group and have just finished therapy as a result of my experiences there! Any idea on how to get the word out?
Thanks
Comments
I know there is no guarantee that a wee group in a cafe will be immune, but maybe laying out some ground rules at the start may offset some of that.
xxxx
The group leaders are all unpaid volunteers.so it's a case of Grin and Bear It, Like it or Lump it, or Do it Yourself if You Think You Can Do it Better.
I kind of feel like going back to a group sometimes. The feedback is like a drug.
I feel like Basil Fawlty, putting 'no riff raff' in his ad for his Hotel, but it's the people who make a writing group.
I met many people I really like at my writing groups, and am still friends with three of them, and the tutor of my first group, who is an FB friend and writer (and who did write for Writing Magazine), and another who is a children's poet but who doesn't do FB.
I was lucky in that all the tutors I had were brilliant at crowd control.
Glad for you that your tutors were good at crowd control. It's always a bit tricky with groups of adults I think. The chair/tutor can't sanction people as a teacher at school would. You just have to hope people are adult enough to behave and of course they're not always. The dynamics of the group are hard to explain. It's a bit weird in some cases - one of the rude members is I think some sort of relative to another member and I get the impression the rather rude one takes advantage of the other's good nature. Then there are members who go way way back - the group's been going for years, and there's a core of six or so members who've been there most of that time - and so there are, in some cases, rivalries and other things all simmering away beneath the surface.
Just edited this post as I realised I may have inadvertently identified someone before! Should be okay now.
Size matters - I went to a group in Edinburgh, where I live - I only went once. Those that know me on here know I don't have a lot of free time and although the meetings ran for 2 and a half hours, we only got around to reading 4 bits of work - there were 18 people there and on that work-rate I wouldn't get any feedback on my assessment until week 5!
I didn't go back,