Prompted by a recent discussion on the Amazon Kindle forums, here’s my two cents’ worth about writing groups.

I joined the South African Writers’ Circle (SAWC) back in 2007 and am still a member. It has a countrywide membership and sends monthly newsletters to its members. Meetings and workshops are held in Durban, and local writing personalities are usually the guest speakers. Most important, the SAWC has competitions which are entered anonymously. Not only does each entry receive a personal critique, but the winning entry and a general critique are published in the next newsletter. This means that you always have something against which to compare your work and see where you might have fallen down, what the judge was looking for and why he or she chose the winning entry over yours. 
 
For the first seven months I kept my mouth shut, listened to the speakers, fumbled through the workshops, read my newsletters and never entered anything. Finally, I plucked up some courage and entered a competition called First Chapter of a Novel. After all, it was anonymous unless you won a placing. I won first place in my first competition and from then on, nothing stopped me. As my writing grew, I hungered for more. 

A year later I enrolled for a postgraduate course in creative writing at my local university, and found myself in a group of nine writers. Four were poets and four wrote short stories, and then there was me, with two mediocre unpublished novels to my name. Over the course of the single semester, we each had to present our new work-in-progress twice, and to comment on the work of each other. We agreed from the first meeting that the environment in which we met was a nurturing one and that no statements could be made without substantiation. We became close to each other and to our two tutors – one of whom tutored the poets and the other tutored the prose writers. We each met with them, one-on-one, throughout the course.

After the course ended, I knew I had become a better writer, but sadly my tutor left the country to work in another university and my fellow students were not interested in any further interaction, as most were continuing with their studies and didn’t have time. I completed and self-published the novella I had written during the course, and continued to write alone, re-working one of my previous novels.

Around that time, Penguin advertised a local competition for African writing, and a number of writers in the SAWC speculated about entering. Four of us made the decision to rework our current projects and enter them. Although we had known each other a while, by the closing date we had formed a strong bond, due to the multitude of encouraging e-mails that flew between us as the deadline loomed.

After the submission date, we took ourselves for a celebratory lunch, and one writer suggested that we meet once a month at her house with our laptops to work on our current projects. As would-be novelists with a common goal and a will to succeed, we didn’t need to be asked twice. 
 
Like my previous writers’ group, we had a policy of nurturing and helping. The first result of those monthly meetings was that we all began to fare better in the SAWC’s monthly competitions, simply because we had had the chance, during the previous month, to read aloud bits of our work to the others and get useful feedback.

None of us made the shortlist for Penguin, by the way, but I think we all won something far more valuable.

Some months later we formed a joint blog in order to get web exposure for that far off day when all our writing careers might take off. We began The Scribbling Scribes in
February 2012, and have developed a good following since then. We each write one piece per month and although we don’t always make our deadlines, we have a few loyal fellow-writers who contribute guest blogs from time to time so that, regardless of how busy we are, a new blog goes up on the site every week.

We still get together once a month and write, eat, drink tea and coffee, and then share bits of our work that we want opinions on. We have been joined by two other writers who have become regulars. Six is a good number to fit around a dining table and still have room for the food. And we’re all still members of the SAWC. 

I must say, I think it was one of the best things we ever did, getting our writing group started. To anyone who wants to be part of a similar group, I would advise you to join a large local writing club of some kind. When you’ve been there long enough, find some fellow-writers who are on the same wavelength as you and suggest a smaller writing group. Choose your people carefully. If you start off small you can always add to it, but it doesn’t work the other way around – writers are phobic about rejection. We were lucky with our group and are still reaping the rewards.

I’ve finally dragged myself deeper into the 21st century by getting a Twitter account. Having been recently told by a friend that he is on Twitter only to follow the tweets of Stephen Fry, I figured that this might be a good way for me to start too.

So I signed up and am now following Stephen Fry, John Cleese, Alan Davies, Richard Hammond, James May and Jeremy Clarkson. I mean, how hard can that be? Not hard at all, as it turns out. I haven’t tweeted anything myself yet. At the moment I’m lurking in the background, tittering at the comments made by some of my favourite men. Perhaps, for people like me, Twitter should drop the W and call it Titter.

I know now that a London cabbie made John Cleese’s day by thinking he was George Clooney; I know that Alan Davies supports Arsenal, to the derision of his friends; and I know that Stephen Fry spent his birthday watching cricket at the Oval. I also know that Richard Hammond mocked his family’s use of wheelie suitcases, until he had walked the length of the train and was in danger of losing an arm from the weight of his own carried luggage, but what does it all mean in the greater scheme of things?

It probably means that I am more interested in hearing amusing trivia than in wondering about war and peace in the world. It also makes me feel a bit like a stalker. Isn’t that what stalkers do – follow someone’s every move, waiting for the crumbs of wisdom to drop from the lips of the much-admired? I hope that, in this case, because their words have been consciously written and sent “out there” it doesn’t matter that unknown fans are picking them up and enjoying them. 

Of course it’s not just about the trivia. Stephen Fry encourages the support of causes and charities that he holds dear, and Alan Davies has been promoting the performances of other comedians at the recent Edinburgh festival, but Twitter is a strange concept, whichever way you look at it.

Two years ago I remember reading on various places on the internet that Twitter was the best platform for an unknown author to promote his or her work, and then a few months later I read that there was nothing so hated on Twitter as writers who used it primarily to spam others about their books. Of course, I am following some of my favourite writers on Twitter as well, and hope to be amongst the first to hear when Anne Fortier’s new book is available on Kindle. I follow her and other writers because I already know their work and am a fan, but I’m not about to spam everyone to let them know when my next book becomes available on Kindle. There is a world of difference between the internationally recognised and followed author and the struggling unknown Indie one.

I suppose that, in time, I will come to use Twitter for such things, but that day seems to be quite far away still. In the meantime, I’m just going to log on and see what Stephen Fry is up to...