Writing Group

Last Saturday I attended the second meeting of a new writers group. It was so cool! I really like all of our members. Though we are at different stages in our writing careers, everyone is encouraging and helpful to one another. This meeting we did critiques on work submitted by four members. I was one of the four, and I submitted an essay about, what else, motherhood. Another woman also submitted an essay, and two guys submitted short stories, both of which were really good.

During each critique everyone gave their comments about the essay or story. I felt that everyone gave constructive criticism, no one gave a change/improvement suggestion without also giving a valid reason. The authors of each piece were very gracious about accepting criticism as well, either noting that they would include suggested improvements in their revisions of the essay/story or explaining why not making the change would be right for the story or essay.

After critiques we did a writing exercise. One of the members was thoughtful enough to pick up a batch of paint color cards from Home Depot. We each selected 3 cards, and on each card were 4 colors. The point of the exercise was to write a story using as many as possible of the 12 colors on your selected cards in a specified amount of time. We chose 20 minutes. After the timer went off we each read our story aloud to the others. This exercise was challenging and fun, and for me produced a short story idea I'm going to continue and flesh out.

Which reminds me to print out submission info to other publications for the rest of the group for our next meeting.