Following from my previous
two guest blogs at firstly Katy aka The Rebel Poetess (https://therebelpoetess.blogspot.com/2018/09/guest-post-andy-n-podcast.html)
and Amanda Steel’s excellent blog as a follow up (https://amandasteelwriter.wordpress.com/2018/09/14/guest-post-andy-n/)
2008 was a watershed year for me certainly after I left the first major writing
workshop I was in and ended up forming eventually a different writing workshop
/ discussion with two other former members of same group.
I am slowly working on my
autobiography / auto non fiction or auto fiction (according to Amanda) ("Losing
the thread)” that will cover the incident in more details but the difference in
changing groups was remarkable at that time in my writing career. That same
previous writing group I don’t know when it formed, but it likely formed
somewhere at the end of 2004 maybe earlier and I came aware of it after joining
a short term writing group at a certain local University (where I studied
previously from 1998 to 2001).
After that course folded,
one of the people who were there who for the sake of this blog I’ll call Cathy
(not her real name) got a few of us to go down to her group which she ran at a
local community centre. Almost right from the start, it was apparent that the
group was very loosely ran with the advertised start time rarely starting at
the advertised time of 7pm sometimes 7.10pm and then later on over time and
sometimes over-running past 9pm which over time narked the people who ran the
centre.
I’ll talk about the collapse
of that group at a later post like I said, as it’s a separate story that will
need explaining in major detail of simply how you don’t run a writing group.
The group I set up with two ex colleagues from the ashes of it when it
collapsed is worth understanding got me going with my writing and I ended up
writing over the first three months of entering this new group three times the
amount of work I had wrote in the last 18 months of my previous group and
entered the live circuit in excitement because of it.
The thing I learnt from this
change was one major thing. Happiness. Yeah, happiness in the sense when it
became apparent to the three of us that the group we were in simply was holding
us back from what we all wanted to it, and in my case enabled to literally got
for it and resulted in my first poetry book ‘Return to Kemptown' following at
the start of 2010.
It's certainly possible if I
had stayed in that group, ‘Return to Kemptown’ wouldn’t have happened and any
of my books that came next after that. That first group we were all in went
stale because of bad running very quickly (see above). I’ve been going to other
groups since, including one which I’ve been going to fairly regularly since the
end of 2010 but that group has been evolving constantly into different
territories with some of our work appearing in art exhibitions and across art
trails all over the North West of England.
Writing I am a firm believer
is a process that is constantly developing and needs to be nurtured as such. Of
course, the bulk of it is written alone but going to good groups I think is an
important process of learning what your writing strengths lays and can only
help you develop and develop as a writer. Going to good groups I learnt
encourages you to try out different approaches and write things that perhaps
otherwise you wouldn’t have attempted to try.
A bad group. Well, I’ll let
you work the effect for yourself…
