New writing group

Joining a new writing group can be a curious thing to do.

I joined a new group a little over two weeks ago.

Mostly I’m good at turning off my internal critic when I sit and write my own work as I’ve learned to do this over many years of practice.

However, I find it much harder to switch off the 'internal critic' when I hear other authors read out their work.

I find myself comparing my ability (or rather my perceived lack of it) to their ability to write, what I hear seems so much more eloquent than anything I’ve written, and I find myself asking why didn’t I think of that?

I suppose the truth is what we each see and hear, when the written word is spoken, can be different. What we each choose to hone in on is different too. And how we write is what makes writing so tough to conquer.

I know I’ve always enjoyed hearing how a group of people can write such diverse pieces given the same instructions.

One of the exercises last week was to describe ‘hands.’

I enjoy doing observational pieces and the feedback I get often surprises me. At the time of writing I thought I hadn’t done this exercise well.

But once again I was surprised by the responses from my fellow writers, some of whom are already published authors. I thought my hurriedly written piece was just a list (not what we were asked to do in the exercise.) Apparently not so. My writing was compared to a current author who I now need to find and investigate.

And then my tutor surprised me by suggesting I should put the two pieces I’d written into some flash fiction competitions! You could have knocked me over with a feather duster…

‘What do you get out of your writing group?’

Signing off until next time… when I’ll share one of the writing exercises we did this week in my next blog spot.