Years ago I heard a story that has stuck with me. Back in West Virginia, a good man stopped going to church. After a couple of years, a preacher stopped by the man’s cabin in the mountains to invite him back, and the man argued that he no longer needed it.
A fire was burning in the hearth and had died down, so that only hot coals shimmered in the fire. The priest took a pair of tongs and pulled a coal from the fire and set it on a stone in front of the hearth. Within a few minutes, the coal began to cool and its fire died.
The priest needed only to raise an eyebrow, and the man got the lesson. Sometimes we can do more together than we can alone.
I got to thinking about this about a year ago. I was talking to my son, who works as a counselor for writers, and he mentioned how very often, when a writer changes one little habit, her entire writing system unravels.
For example, he mentioned one writer who would play a game of solitaire for a few minutes before he wrote. Soon that game consumed whole hours and whole days. The writer’s schedule was unraveled by one bad habit, and my son simply has to tell him, quit playing solitaire. And that reminded me of on international bestseller who once told me, “I lost two years of my life playing Civilization.”
You see, people often go through phases where they write wonderfully. Maybe they’re doing something subconsciously—like reading good books, or writing in the morning when their bio rhythms for writing are at a peak, or they’re writing in a genre they love—and suddenly they change and magic stops flowing. My son once said that in many cases, he identifies that change and then tells the writer simply, “Go back to what works.”
The same, I have seen, may be true with writing groups. I’ve been in several of them, and recently I started the Apex group. I started it because I perceive a need for such a group, one where talented individuals share their passion, their wisdom and triumphs.
Years ago, I read a letter in which Ernest Hemingway had been trying to figure out a title for one of his novels. He had searched in vain for one, and asked some of his friends for help. He went first to one writer, someone who later won a Nobel Prize, and asked some advice that didn’t work. So he asked another writer—who offered up the title “The Sun also Rises,” and that worked. Coincidentally, that author also won a Nobel Prize.
So here were three writers in a writing group, exchanging advice, and all three winning Nobel Prizes.
Similarly, I would have loved to have gone to Oxford eighty years ago and hobnobbed with the likes of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien about writing fantasy. And the notion has often struck me that in today’s world, we’re free to find our own partners in writing inspiration—our own Hemingways and Tolkiens. I know one fine author who works as a shepherd in New Zealand. He’s a long way from anyone who might heat him up, but in today’s world, he can reach out via the internet.
Yet writing groups so often fail. They don’t always fail due to bruised egos. I belonged to a nice one in college, but after college I moved away and it became too inconvenient. A number of other good writers also moved away, and all of us, like simmering coals removed from the fire, lost some of our heat.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about group dynamics. What is it that you want in a writing group? Here are a few thoughts.
First off, let me explain that any one person might fulfill several roles. In other words, you might be able to fill three or four roles. Just as you can be a loving father, a tough soldier, and a devoted son to your mother, you can fill any of these roles listed below. In fact, to some degree you have to fill all of them. Yet if you are in a group with others who help support you, you may be stronger together than you are apart.
Heating Up
- By David Farland
- Posted on January 4, 2021
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