Creative Writing: Self-Help And Suggestions...

View From The Barrow Wake by B.R.Marshall

If you want to write a best seller, self-help and sex are the subjects to get you the highest sales. Think of all the books on dieting that'll hit the shelves to coincide with our New Year Resolutions in January 2015, or the sales figures of Fifty Shades Of Grey.

Whatever your book is about, how are you going to get it written? You'll need imagination and determination, but it helps to have some encouragement along the way, too. This is where self-help and community action join forces.

I wrote here about how the Marcher Chapter of the Romantic Novelists' Association held a creative writing workshop back in the spring. We each submitted ten pages of our work in advance. Then we all made notes on everyone else's work, and presented them on the day.

I found the experience of having other writers assess my work really helpful. After all, they're keen readers, too, and that's exactly the audience I want to entertain.  After a day spent talking about nothing but the craft of writing, we all went home after that workshop with lots of inspiration.

Along with everyone else, I was encouraged to finish the work I'd showcased. You can read an extract from The Survivors' Club here. Our workshop that day was the final push I needed to finish the whole book. After a final polish, it was packed off to the publisher. Everyone else arrived at our next meeting with similar stories. Nobody wanted to be the one to confess they hadn't done anything more with their project!

The need for advice, and a spur to turn it into action, are prime reasons to join a local group. The online writing community is great, but sometimes it's good to get out from behind your screen and meet other people face-to-face. If there isn't a writing group in your area already, why not start one yourself? It's got the potential to be much more productive that a simple book club, although there's nothing to stop you combining the two. All writers are readers, and you might encourage other people to pick up their pens. That's how fan fiction began, after all. You can cheer each other up when the going is tough, and cheer each other on when it's going well. All it takes is somewhere to meet. Plenty of tea and cake always helps the creative process, but that's optional!

If you want your meetings to be productive as well as sociable you need a good chairman (or chairwoman) to keep meetings on topic, and make sure everyone gets a chance to speak. Criticism should always be constructive, and try and keep to the ratio of three stars to every black hole–that is, highlight three times more good points than you give suggestions for improvement. It keeps meetings upbeat. That way, you all go home feeling your work has been praised more than it's been criticised. It makes everyone feel more confident about tackling the suggested revisions.

Do you belong to a writers' group or book club? What's the most useful piece of information you've been given?