I got mine today in tiny Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, when five colleagues from my cohort in Wilkes University's Master of Arts in Creative Writing program met, primarily to share our current writing projects.
After
- Each of us provided status updates on our capstone projects. Some were being revised. Some were being shopped. Some were being shopped and revised as the result of being shopped.
- We shared our writing plans, mostly for the short term.
- Each writer read about ten minutes worth from whatever project they were working on now.
- Then we all responded verbally to each piece-- a personal response to the overall writing as well as a broader give-and-take.
As for me, I was looking for a third-party gut check on a new novel called RACE CARD. Though the group was not aware of this, I was a bit gun-shy about sharing the work with them or anyone for that matter. Once very excited about it, I encountered what the late, great Dorothea Brande calls a "tooth and fang" reviewer in an online writing group who had totally shaken my confidence in the project. Thanks to my discerning group, I'm happy to report that after today's reading, my confidence has been restored. The group's encouragement recharged my batteries, giving me all the wherewithal I could ever hope to gain to continue writing the book and press toward finishing it.
According to The Writing Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, even informal meetings among writers who trust one another can be productive:
Sometimes encouragement and the knowledge that others are interested in and committed to your work and your progress as a writer can be just as helpful as [formal] feedback.Writing is a lonely pursuit. For natural extroverts like me, it can be disarmingly quiet living in your own head, which is what you have to do during the writing process. Sharing my ambitions for my capstone, vetting my WIP in front of writing colleagues I trust was just the shot in the arm I needed to press on, in spite of the setbacks and rejections every writer working to be published encounters.
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