Have you always wanted to write about your life, but never known how or where to start? Well, read on with your writer’s heart. There are people like you in every community and suburb who’d jump at an opportunity to collaborate and learn if a club opened up nearby. People have stories to tell, stories from their lives that they want or need to share. So, how about starting a life writing club where storytelling can flourish.
Some of you may think taking a course or doing a workshop is the way to go. The notion that guidance is needed is hard to shake. But observation as a life writing coach showed me that coming together provides the primary impetus for getting our stories onto the page. Collaborative learning is great. The more input by each member, the more fruitful the outcome.
While book clubs proliferate nowadays, when it comes to writing, the situation is dire. You can find creative writing groups in church and community halls but many are simple appreciation societies. Most focus on creative writing. You may fancy starting or attending a writers’ Meetup but my experience is that you often encounter competitive souls there. That’s fine if that’s your gig and you can similarly attend the occasional workshops hosted by council libraries or, increasingly, by Writers’ Centres.
But you won’t find writing clubs on offer, especially not life writing clubs.
Advantages of the Club Format
A club is a perfect forum for life writing.
In simple lterms, a club is —
…a group of persons organized for a social, literary, sporting, political, or
Macquarie Dictionaryother purpose , regulated by rules agreed by its members.
Notice that rules are ‘agreed by members’. No boss.
(You can, of course, incorporate your club and become a legal entity, but that is not what I’m proposing here. I’m suggesting a small, familiar and intimate gathering for the purpose of collaborating on your writing and storytelling. In Australia, each State has it’s own Consumer Affairs if you want to go down this path. )
In the end, it is not about how well you write, but how close to yourself you are game to get.
Clubs are equalizers and, as such, provide a nurturing environment for being OK being just who you are. No writing credentials necessary. When you write personal stories, you make a direct investment in yourself. And, when we write with purpose like that, the need to compare ourselves with other writers disappears. Life writing engages the reality of our lives and experiences and, when we
If you decide to form a life writing club, don’t worry about differences in culture, age or background. Writing about one’s life in a group brings out commonalities of human experience within diversity. Indeed, in a well-run group, writers will feel safe to share which allows trust, warmth and congeniality to arise. And, it is there, that creativity flourishes.
Start-up Tips
The critical factor for success is to find people who are open to discovering themselves. They don’t need to be friends. But they join with a willingness to dig deep, be real and have fun in the process. Compassion, respect, fondness and friendship follow.
Members
Don’t worry about differences in culture, age or background. Writing about one’s life in a group brings out the commonalities in diversity. Indeed, in a well-run group, writers will feel safe to share and, there, creativity will flourish. An ideal number to get started would be seven to ten people.
Flyer
Create a flyer. It should give a date, time and interim venue plus a contact number or email for queries. The initial invitation is for people to get together at a coffee shop or café to talk about forming a club in your area. Post the flyer on notice boards; at Coles, in laundromats and storefronts. Go beyond your suburb but stay within cooee.
Post the invitation on Facebook or on any other social media. If you belong to other groups, spread the word there.
The flyer should tantalise with the promise of self-discovery and using phrases like —
- tell your own story
- tap into your creativity
- gain perspective on the past
- achieve personal insight
- have fun
- meet new people
- help create a circle of safety for storytelling.
Promotions
So, start with a flyer. It should give a date, time and venue plus a contact number or email for queries. The invitation is for people to get together at a coffee shop or café to talk about forming a club in your area. Post it on notice boards; at Coles, in laundromats and storefronts. Go beyond your suburb but stay within cooee.
Post the details on Facebook, too or on any other social media. If you belong to other groups, spread the word there.
Initial Meeting
At the initial meeting, or over a couple of get-togethers, you can collaborate in drawing up the club’s rules. First thing will be to agree on times and periodicity, then venues and length of meetings. It is probably best to meet no sooner every fortnight or month, probably the latter is best because members will need writing time in between. You should allocate at least three hours.
Regular Venue
You can take turns meeting hosting meetings or book space at a community centre, in a library or gather in a coffee shop, café or pub. Be creative in choosing your venue but remember you will need privacy.
‘When someone goes on a trip, he has something to tell about’, goes the German saying, and people imagine the storyteller as someone who has come from afar. But they enjoy no less listening to the man who has stayed at home, making an honest living, and who knows the local tales and traditions.
Walter Benjamin
Basic Club Parameters and Rules
- As a matter of respect and to ensure success, members must agree to maintain confidentiality and commit to the principle of nondisclosure. The former is well understood. The latter includes refraining from raising other people’s stories with them outside club meetings, despite it being shared within the group. Further, there is nothing worse after you reveal intimate details of your life for another person to say, ‘I know, I know, I had that too’. That is appropriating another’s experience it disempowers the storyteller and breaches trust.
- Do not pre-circulate written stories. Although this is customary in creative writing circles, the magic of collective life-writing is precisely in the immediacy of face-to-face sharing.
- Always keep a box of tissues on hand and a ‘pretend’ jar for people to put ‘air’ money in if they apologise for their story or writing. (Many people apologise about themselves in so many ways and the aim, here, is to help them gain confidence.)
- Members should bring along an exercise they have discovered or made up (for ideas, see the of works list in last month’s post). The club’s work is for each member to contribute writing prompts as well as writing, sharing and providing feedback.
- The exercise format is simple. First, read the exercise to the group and invite questions. Second, allot 7 – 10 minutes of writing time with the instruction that people should write straight from the (no dilly dally thinking time). Then share one at a time and discuss. Over time, people will have a number of small pieces of work (which should be named) to develop further.
- A useful rule of thumb is for the writer to remain silent while others offer feedback.
- As the club grows in confidence, you might introduce some creative techniques. Again, there is a lot written out there, and each member could research one creative writing technique to share with others at meetings. Members can revise their earlier work as homework, and as work refines, perhaps that can be shared by email for feedback. The process is cumulative.
Techniques
Life writing is a two-step process. Our first attempt when we write life stories is like talking to the page. It is an outpouring. The craft then is a matter of turning the writing around to entice a reader. Here is an exercise that allows you to practice doing that.
Exercise
Write for 10 minutes on a major turning point or sliding-door moment in your life. Write fast, straight from the guts as your memory brings that moment back to you.
Consider what you have written. Read it as though it were someone else’s story. Then tell the story again using the third person. Doing this should give you enough distance from the emotion
Now re-write the story giving your character a fictional name and show him or her coming to that moment – what were they doing leading up to the moment. What did they want or fear? How did they feel (change) after that turning point? Better or worse? What new direction did they find?
Even as you tell your own life stories, you will need to change your perspective and give your readers a reason to read. They’ll want to know ‘what next’.
