Typing is Fun!
In my ongoing quest to plaster my calendar with Happy Face stickers, I have come upon some fun things that sometimes come at me sideways.
My writing group is one of them. I always enjoy the group but what has been a dawning realization is that it’s a huge source of fun as well.
Now, I would agree that a writing group is probably not the first thing that springs to mind in conjunction with the word, FUN. But yesterday, as I was driving back from Gibsons with the music cranked and a smile pasted on my face, I figured it out.
In polite society, it’s not considered good form to agonize over comma placements. One doesn’t usually make cocktail party chatter that includes vehemently defending the idea of not using quotation marks.
And I don’t usually phone up any of my regular friends to proclaim my happiness that comes from changing several verbs from passive to active. And I’m quite sure it’s not worthy of Facebook status to shout out that my writing group helped me remove a sentence that did nothing to further a scene.
But every third or fourth week, we come together…a gathering of written word geeks who love spending three hours on a Sunday relishing each verb, noun and paragraph. We don’t run into each other much outside of this group and if there was a class photo, you might be hard pressed to imagine what this unlikely assemblage had in common with each other and why the heck they had such large grins…but the answer would come to you if you could be a fly on the wall at one of our sessions;
That is when you would witness our genuine pride and excitement – for each other – when our suggestions help to make a sentence so perfect that you swear it might fly off the page. You would see people brave enough to read out their most innermost thoughts, expose their craziness and views of the world and share their undefended hearts.
There is something else that’s amazing about this process of feedback and constructive critique (with the right people). I learn as much about technique when I’m working on someone else’s piece as I do when I’m receiving feedback on mine.
I didn’t know when I started writing this post that this is where I’d end up, but then that’s more often the case than not. It would seem this has evolved into an Ode to my Writing Group…so thank you Jan, Sheila, Joan, Stephen, Gayle and Theresa. You guys are wonderful.
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