writing groups

[seldear]

Day at work; ostensibly to print things, go through my mail, check my things, and work out how to delete my computer HD when i leave next week...

getyourwordsout is asking if people want to be put into 'encouragement groups' for our writing this year.

While my instinctive answer is 'yes', I'm well aware that I should be extremely wary of signing up to be randomly grouped with people that I'll be accountable to for an entire year, and with whom I may or may not have anything in common.

Technically, I have my real-world writing buddies, but that group's more social and less writing these days. The person who organised the write-ins went to Wales for a couple of years and is due back in May this year, and we've become more social, less writing over the last five years that we've all known each other.

The only woman who's really seriously writing is neck-deep in her original story, and she really likes talking about it, while I couldn't care less. Mostly, it's that she treats me like a couple of other friends who are DEEPLY ENGROSSED in her story (she posts chapters to them as she goes along - they're kind of like her alpha readers), while I am very casually involved. Her genre is YA fantasy, and while I like that, her stories are about family and dysfunction and the rush of sexual feelings and dramatic Pacific Northwest family feuds.

It's kind of what I imagine Twilight to be without the vampires and with sex. (Disclaimer: I have never read Twilight, so I don't actually know, but it sounds like that same slightly melodramatic young adult backdrop.)

I'm not sure what I want in a writing group, I guess. I'm bad at reading other people's fic, TBH, so I'm not good for feedback. I guess I want people to write with, and talk with about my fic, or my original ideas, and possibly to be accountable to...

IDEK.

Comments

[adafrog.livejournal.com]

Huh. Sounds like it might be good, but I totally see your point.

Talking about the Pacific Northwest? Interesting.

[seldearslj.livejournal.com]

The problem tends to be that I get grouped with people who are twenty years younger than me and have no life experience and nothing in common. Or they only write men, beautiful men too busy white dick fencing to do anything else (oh, maybe save the world between fucking each other). Or they're American with no concept of anything beyond their country's borders apart from wanting to move to Canada or Europe...

She comes from the Pacific Northwest, and sets her story there - very white rural stuff...

[adafrog.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've noticed quite the different with young writers. Can definitely tell pretty quickly.

Ah. I was wondering. Just so you know, the west part of the PNW isn't hick white. As much. As the eastern part. lol (I'm from both sides of Oregon).

[seldearslj.livejournal.com]

She's an American living in Australia, so she knows about the "hick white" aspect; I guess it simply doesn't appeal to me.

[adafrog.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I grew up in some of it, so I can understand the not being interested. One of the reasons I never liked Napolean Dynamite. Literally grew up within a few hundred miles of there.