A fantastic way to overcome writer’s block is to join writers’ groups. I belong to three in Chester where I live. They’re all related to each other – two take place in a pub, one on a Thursday afternoon, another on a Thursday evening. At these, we can bring about 500 words to read from some Work in Progress, and the others provide feedback. I love it when people can empathise with what I’ve written. Useful comments are made, such as bringing in more senses; I’ve been told that I concentrate solely on the visual, and should bring in more sounds,, smells etc. My two fiction books are written in the present tense, from different characters’ first-person points of view. I was warned that these characters should sound distinct from each other to make this work.
The third group meets online once a month. There are four or five of us, and we submit a maximum of 3000 words to the others for feedback. We then meet a couple of weeks after the submission for an online discussion. I’ve belonged to this group for about a year now, and I can honestly say that, as someone who loves to write, it’s the most important thing I do. The others put a lot of effort into reading my work, giving useful critiques, advice on structuring dialogue, describing scenes, and setting the text out on the page. Each month, I take the file of the comments each person has made and go through them carefully, making sure I’ve taken them all on board.
When providing feedback, I want to give as much as I’m receiving from this group. Sometimes I feel I haven’t got much beyond saying “I like this”. But I apply a grammar checker (which I pay a significant amount for) to each one and feel it makes a useful contribution. Also, when I first read through the others’ submissions, I write down my immediate reaction and try to trust it.
I write contemporary fiction, and no one else in my group does. This took a bit of getting used to, but I love their work and admire their descriptions and use of language.
A key factor of the writers’ groups is that they give me goals to aim for. Writing 3000-4000 words per month isn’t trivial. In addition to the fiction, I have a nonfiction book about the World War 2 Enigma machine that I co-wrote with my husband. We’ve had significant problems in getting this published, and I picked it up last week for the first time in five years. The aim is to polish it up as much as I can and find a publisher interested in it. I haven’t brought any sections of this book into the groups. But, I’ve learnt so much about writing technique in recent years that I feel like a new person when going over this manuscript again.