Writers Groups

This one goes out to my two faithful readers. I'm sorry it has taken me five months to post to my blog. I can come up with at least three lame reasons but instead I'll act as if this disgrace never happened.

One of the major things I seem to be missing in my non-college years is constructive feedback on my writing. I miss bouncing ideas off people and working through the stale sections in a work. Yet as I really think about it even in school I didn't get a lot of feedback everyone seemed to be in a hurry to get to their work, but still more then I am now receiving.

I need to form a writing group, but again I'm not planing on stick around here for too much longer. I'd hate to start something only to leave in a year or two. It might be good experience and a perfect excuse to bail if it doesn't work out. hmmm I'll think about it.

The ticket would be to find a small group that was willing to take on the work of not only reading your work but the work of five others and coming up with beneficial comments. I think the ideal number would be 4 to 6. That way if two people don't show up you still have as least 2 more people that did show up. The hard part is finding a group that would be willing to put the time into it. Students have too much in their life to handle more reading and meetings. Parents are also too busy so you need to find people that are either just out of college or past the parenting years.

The other question is how do you weed out the crazies? I've worked at a library long enough to know that there are a lot of people that write and a lot of them are not taking their needed medication. How do you keep them from coming to the meetings or even finding out about them. I don't want to promote the group in a public place so anyone can find it but I also want people to find it. Coffee houses are the first idea then there are places like a campus but then you get the busy college kids. I wounder if there is a site that acts as a message board for groups? I'll have to hunt. But then once again that doesn't help you find people you can meet locally unless they are aware of the site and that might rule out older people.

Last question, how often do you meet? I would like to say once a month to keep it simple for everyone, but is that enough? A serious writer might want feedback on a regular basis. I think the most you could hope for would be twice a month, but if you're too strict then people might stop coming if they haven't done the reading.

If anyone has ideas let me know otherwise I'll research this the old librarian way and let you know what I find.