Writing in Community: Say Goodbye to Writer's Block & Transform Your Life

By Lucy Adkins and Becky Breed

Writing in Community is a book of inspiration and encouragement for writers who want to reach deep within themselves and write to their fullest potential.

There is magic in a successful writing group. This book helps writers tap into that magic, and with gentle wisdom and humor, experience unprecedented breakthroughs in creativity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WriteLife Publishing
• Release date: Apr 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781608080823

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Copyright

Copyright ©2013 by Lucy Adkins and Becky Breed

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from publisher.

Published by WriteLife, LLC 2323 S. 171 St.

Suite 202

Omaha, NE 68130

www.writelife.com

ISBN 978-1-60808-082-3

First Edition

For Writers Everywhere

There is nothing as wise as a circle.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

We dedicate our book to Lynn Samsel, longtime Write On! member and friend to all, who died shortly before the publication of this book. Lynn will be remembered for her powerful writing, warm heart, and steadfast faith.

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WRITING IN COMMUNITY

Say Goodbye to Writer’s Block and Transform Your Life

Lucy Adkins and Becky Breed

Introduction

We want this book to be an invitation to join the writing community, to write in community. We want to challenge you, inspire you, show you how to start a writing group or improve the group you have. When we speak of a writing group, we mean writing, not critiquing, not suggesting ways to improve, what words to change in a poem, which paragraph of an essay to strike out. We mean forming and belonging to a group that actually generates writing each time it meets, so that each member goes home with a scribbled notebook page or two of real writing, the beginning drafts of what many times will go on to become a good completed poem, essay, or short story.

We want to help you improve your life as a writer, be you a beginning writer, or one with many poems or essays under your belt. We want to suggest a way in which you can enlarge your life. We want to inspire you, walk along the path a ways with you, and we want to have a good time.

In this book we will show you how a good generative writing group works. We will talk about how the group forms, coalesces, and the basic format of each meeting. We will share poems, essays, and pieces of fiction that have come out of writing groups, and we will offer suggestions for writing exercises.

The writing group is not a coffee klatch, a meet-and-commiserate session about how difficult writing can be; it is a way to do something about it. It is a way to keep the hand moving across the page, to keep the ink streaking along. We’ll talk a lot about that.

Because we are not only writers, but people of the world with our insecurities, our feelings of inadequacy, our moments of pettiness, and our worries, we want to show you how a writing group can open up your life, fill it with joy—and we believe this strongly—help you to connect to something bigger than you are.

Writing in Community is a book for beginning writers and writers with experience, and for teachers of writing at all levels. We hope to inspire and encourage and most of all, we hope that you will gather with other like-minded individuals, that you will write, and in the process, transform your life.

Authors’ Note

The examples and stories within these pages are the truth as we have experienced it, through writing and participating in various writing groups, and in living in this world. Some of the names, however, have been changed for purposes of confidentiality.

PART ONE:

IN THE BEGINNING

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

—Marianne Williamson

Chapter One:

This Life of Writing

We learned early on that there was magic in words, that there was an unknown world of little boys in blue blowing their horns, falling bridges, owls and cats in boats; and in these nursery rhymes, we learned that there were sounds like music: hey diddle, diddle and a hey down, dingle down, dingle down day. There was craziness and meaning all mixed up, and we wanted to play along, clap along, and learn the rhymes, and many of us wanted to make up our own. These people we call writers, and if you are reading these words, then you are a member of the tribe of writers and this book is for you.

The writing life is stimulating and soul-satisfying; it is full of delightful surprises; but much as we extol its wonders, it is not always easy. There are times when the words just don’t come. We sit at our desks or kitchen tables or easy chairs with pen in hand and wait; but it seems the muse is absent today, we have nothing to say. The clock ticks. We sigh and get up to get a cup of coffee, come back and try again. Still no dice. Or, maybe we take a deep breath and manage to eke out a few lines, then immediately scratch them out again. This is terrible, we say, and we think up all kinds of words to berate ourselves: what we write is drivel, trash, mere pulp, words that limp across the page, fall down in the margins and die. Oh, we can be very creative in the art of self-condemnation. We listen too deeply to the little voice of doubt inside. Writer Natalie Goldberg calls this the Internal Censor, continuously whispering that we are not good enough. Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, thinks of it as a serpent, slithering around your creative Eden, hissing vile things to keep you off guard. However we see this internal critic—as a nasty little person providing a steady stream of invective, or a loathsome snake in the grass—we must do everything we can to lessen its power.

Oftentimes writing is lonely. Perhaps you have been writing a year or two, secret closet writing, and one day shyly mention your new passion to a group of friends. Oh, that’s nice, they say, but they look at you wondering, and in their expressions you read what they are really thinking: You mean you spend an hour every day just writing? Writing in your journal or writing a story, or for heaven’s sake, a poem? You do that when you could be advancing your career or if not that, scrubbing out the mildew from your bathroom tile? Even if your tile is sparkling, and your career is going along just fine, what is the purpose of scratching down all those words? There are times when our non-writing friends just don’t get it and we feel misunderstood. We may begin to think that maybe this writing obsession is a little self-absorbed, and there might be more productive ways of spending our time.

This is where the writing community comes in. Popular lore would depict writers as grubby, wild-eyed individuals who shut themselves off from the world to concentrate on their art. But, while we crave periods of solitude and silence in which to write, we also need community. We need friends, peers who understand that there is nothing more joyous than an hour of the pen racing across the page, and there is nothing like the despair of day after day of not writing. We need someone to assure us that it is all right to take the time to write. We are not being self-indulgent. We have been blessed with a gift and it would be wrong to turn our backs on it. We need validation and understanding, and we need friendly support to keep on writing. This book is written to encourage you and help you in finding and sustaining a writing group that will do just that.

There are three basic types of writing groups: literary associations which feature readings and talks by guest speakers; critique groups, whose members come together for the purpose of receiving feedback on their work; and lastly and least common, the generative writing group, so called because its main purpose is to generate writing, to get something down on paper. All three types of groups are valuable and you may want to belong to several, but this book will focus on the generative writing group. We have received such sustenance from our generative group, Write On!, and feel so passionately about it, that we want to share our experiences and encourage you in finding or creating a group of your own.

Write On! consists of nine members. There are four retirees: Leo, white-haired, white-bearded, a big, gentle bear of a man who has been a federal employee, a care-giver, and still works as a substitute teacher; his wife, Martha, mother of five, grandmother of thirteen, great grandmother of five, a woman of great intelligence and spirit; Dee Ritter, a woman with a ready smile and an unruly mop of white hair, who grew up near the land her great-grandfather homesteaded in eastern Nebraska; and Luella Corliss Sphon, a teacher of many years, small, and possessed of a great wit. Other members include Zoya Zeman, red-haired, sensitive, a connoisseur of the arts, whose life has been devoted to social issues; Lynn Samsel, a native San Franciscan, a fairly new writer when she came to our group, who is also a Ph.D., an artist, social activist and grant writer; and Heidi Hermanson, the youngest of the group who has great eyes and a big heart, and drives many miles over bad roads for poetry readings, art exhibits, anything that excites her imagination. Lastly, there are we two writers of this book: Becky Breed, a former principal of an alternative high school whose great mission in life has been working with young people living on the margins; and Lucy Adkins, lover of nature, all things gardening and all things writing, who grew up in rural Nebraska, attended country schools and currently serves as leader of the group.

Write On! has inspired us, sustained us, and is the spark of much good writing. Many examples of poems, essays, and short fiction which came about as a result of the group will appear throughout these pages.

A Catch-22

If you are having difficulty writing, if you are suffering a block and cannot get a decent line or two inked out on paper to save your life, there is nothing more therapeutic than actually writing. A generative writing group can make this happen. How, you may ask? I can’t write and you tell me to write to cure that? Isn’t that a Catch-22? Not exactly. A generative writing group soothes you and inspires you and sometimes it tricks you so that suddenly you are writing.

Here’s how it works: after a few introductory remarks about upcoming readings or workshops, the writing exercise is introduced. The leader may ask you to jot down in your notebook a list of things you love. All right, you make the list—anyone can do that. Then, the leader asks you to pick one of those things and suggests you write a few lines beginning with the phrase I love the way… You have twenty minutes.

Dutifully, you copy down the prompt. Hmmm. You write it down again below the first line, and suddenly your pen is flashing across the page and you are writing about how you love the way your blind friend, Mary, reads with her hands, how she dreams the silken feel of fabric, the spicy scent of nutmeg in the nose. Soon the writing time is up and you have written something down; and when you read it over, it is not half bad.

Writing in a group encourages you to write on themes and topics you never would have imagined. At another meeting, you may be asked to make a list of the scars you have, and you write about the time you stepped on a piece of broken glass on the sidewalk in front of the local five and dime store, and the storekeeper scolded you for walking barefoot; or you write of the strange scar-like patterns that appear on the pale leaves of columbine in your garden. Perhaps when the group is making a collective word list, someone says the word Serengeti, and you write about a wildebeest mother and her calf ringed by wild dogs. You see the slather dripping from the tongues of the dogs and feel the calf’s panic. The dust lifts, the setting sun turns the sky into a blaze of orange, and one by one the dogs slink off into the shadows. Where did that come from? There is magic that happens in a writer’s mind actively engaged and working, and there is compounded magic that happens when a group of writers join together to write. This is the Group Factor at work. Startling insights appear out of nowhere, the imagination is unleashed, and you find new openings and possibilities in your writing.

Sometimes the few lines scribbled during a writing exercise come to naught—it was a nice effort and it gets your mind whirring, but that’s as far as it goes. There are other times when the writing goes on to become a completed poem, perhaps even a whole series of poems, or the beginning of a novel. Meeting after meeting of our group, we are amazed and delighted with what emerges from the pens of our members. Go home and type that up, we encourage. Tweak that a little and send that in to a good journal! Our members have done that and the work has been published. One such piece is Dee Ritter’s poem, Wild Girl, which came out of the exercise on scars.

Wild Girl

First let me tell you

that girls from the Midwest

didn’t pierce their ears.

We wore bobby socks

and saddle shoes.

Only wild girls pierced their ears.

But my California sister

rode the hills in cable cars

and her two-inch golden hoops

swayed in tandem to her hips.

On an old Formica table

in an apartment on a hill

we sterilized the needles

and iced my tender lobes

while Pete Seeger

sang our songs.

— Wild Girl

What if the group had not been there to midwife the poem into the world? What if Dee had been tired that night and had decided not to come? Many such works, published and unpublished, have had their beginnings in generative writing groups. Again and again, we see the magic happen. It’s terrible when we must miss, and we can’t wait for the next time.

A Certain Energy

This mystery or magic is probably one of the most intriguing aspects of writing in a group, and it is the most difficult to describe. Something happens when a group of people are given a prompt and are then expected to write. Writer Judy Reeves refers to this as an electric current of connection, not just one writer to another, but one human to another. There is a collective consciousness, a certain energy of the group, even if its members are silent, just scribbling away. Leo Kovar describes it like this: I am given a prompt and start writing, he says, and I am… whoosh… off into some other space… How wonderful! The magic is about having an open mind, listening, and allowing the images just below the surface to emerge. It is about the discipline of the writing time and the expectation that you will write, and along with this the freedom to write whatever comes into your head. Sometimes, there is the feeling that what you are putting down on paper is not even coming from your own head, but from some power greater than you are. You are just the one with the pen in her hand and so you write it down. There’s that part of the magic too, and one that thrills you and keeps you coming back.

After the quiet time of writing, each member is given the opportunity to read his or her work and receive feedback. It is so important that a writer’s work be heard, and by being heard, we mean read aloud. You hear what you’ve written, and spoken aloud, it sounds pretty good … even to yourself. If you have doubts, you see the smiles lighting up the eyes of those around you. You hear how they liked the line Child. How you could roar! How the phrasing of