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Once, with another woman …
Something stolen
While you were driving
These were my mistakes
In my grandmother's house
I'm thinking of …
Write about a summer fling
You are lost
What you see in the distance
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Here’s what happens in writing practice groups: First, and most important for some, the writing gets done. More than a few participants have confessed that the only time they write is in their writing practice group, which is too bad because, more than anything, it’s the consistency, the daily doing of the thing, that ultimately makes for better and deeper writing and a more fulfilled writer. Second, there is the celebration of spending time in community with others doing what we love - writing. No matter what we do before or after our writing group, this is the indissoluble time that fills us up.
During any given session, we may work through a sticky place in a scene, make the happy acquaintance of a new character, release wild ambition upon the page, create something new and luminous, or write the ending to something old and laden. We may reveal secrets, unlock doors, stumble over bones or bump against ghostly rememberings. We may learn something new or experience an emotional catharsis. Writing for revenge or healing, out of anger or sorrow, imagining or wondering or just plain old curiosity - the magical “what if…,” we do it all, and maybe we do it only in the company of others.
There is yet another striking occurrence that happens in group writing. A synchronicity that is as inexplicable as creativity and as mysterious as inspiration. Two writers use the same unusual word - doppelganger, for example - or both mention Bach and Karen Carpenter in the same piece, or write about deep-rooted trees. This seemingly coincidental happenstance of words or images is so startling it never fails to take my breath away, yet so common that those of us who are veteran group writers accept it as a predictable and delightful part of the process. I’ve taken to jotting these synchronistic events down: two mentions of stiletto in a writing about coming to the end of the road, a couple of notes on dead presidents in a piece about what was found in a pocket, three references to secrets during a prompt taken from the first line of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (“All she had was a single photograph.”) Long ago, before writing in groups, before making that intimate and intuitive connection I have come to expect in such gatherings, I used to call such occurrences simple coincidence, but no longer. I know there is magic afoot.
To be sure, there is still the hard and solitary work of rewriting, editing, polishing that each writer must go and do alone. But the creation stuff, the community and support and Wild Mouse ride of first draft writing - these are what a writing practice group can nurture.
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