{"id":5941,"date":"2016-07-28T05:58:47","date_gmt":"2016-07-28T09:58:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5941"},"modified":"2016-07-28T05:58:47","modified_gmt":"2016-07-28T09:58:47","slug":"praise-for-a-writing-group","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5941","title":{"rendered":"Praise for a Writing Group"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Room

The “Room at the Table” Table<\/p><\/div>\n

Each year, our local Chamber of Commerce newspaper publishes a summer fiction issue, and this week nine members of my writing group had our work published\u2014every one of us who submitted, as far as I know!<\/p>\n

For some time I\u2019ve felt the many rewards of having this close-knit writing group, which we call Room at the Table, in acknowledgement of our welcoming spirit. The irony is, there isn\u2019t any more room at my dining table, where we meet, because we\u2019ve gradually grown to 15 loyal members. The group is about equally divided between men and women, all of us \u201cover 35,\u201d and the genres we write in are diverse.<\/p>\n

Each month we spend two hours critiquing about eight submissions by fellow group members, sticking more or less to our rule of thumb of 1500 words apiece. Some members say they come for the snacks, but they all come with carefully reviewed submissions, ready to discuss. We laugh a lot.<\/p>\n

Group members provide enthusiasm, help people get unstuck, ask the occasional big question (Where Is This Going?) and generously share our ideas, grammatical obsessions, candid feedback, and praise.<\/p>\n

Occasionally, we do a group exercise, and one such, which involved imagining the characters of a ghost story, created such enthusiasm among three of us that we all wrote the story and were all published. This past spring we each wrote a short story on the theme of \u201cbeing stuck,\u201d and are thinking of turning the result into a story collection.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve heard woeful tales of critique groups that like to eviscerate the author. That isn\u2019t us. Our members recognize that serious writing is a lonely task and publishing is hard. We go out of our way to be supportive even when delivering the message: \u201cneeds work.\u201d We\u2019re supportive outside our meetings too. One of our number recently had a short play read by professional actors, and four of us trekked into Manhattan to see it; another, a Brit, appears in local pantos, and we go see him.<\/p>\n

In March and October, we do readings of our fiction at the local library. We\u2019ve done this five times now, and attendance is growing! It\u2019s great to hear applause and laughter (in the right spots). And, of course, we serve snacks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Each year, our local Chamber of Commerce newspaper publishes a summer fiction issue, and this week nine members of my writing group had our work published\u2014every one of us who submitted, as far as I know! For some time I\u2019ve … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Praise for a Writing Group - mutual aid and support pays off","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[62,174,29],"tags":[28],"class_list":["post-5941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-first-draft-blog","category-writing","tag-writers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1xP","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5941"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5942,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5941\/revisions\/5942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}