It’s another Bringing You Our Words post and I know some of you must be curious what the next step into getting our anthology together was. Much like all of us individually getting our stories together, this step was just as important: the club itself.
As University of Michigan students, we had a lot on our plate. Doesn’t matter who you are or what your major is. At one point or another, things got hectic and in the moments between the chaos, some of us found the time for this special club called Writers’ Community (it’s a very literal title). Weekly each Thursday night, members would come together in Mason Hall (or over zoom) for at least two hours, share all the stories, poetry, or screenplays we had time to work on, give thoughts and feedback, and if we had time leftover, play some writerly games.
The picture here is a series of pages from one such game called exquisite corpse. The rules are that the first person makes up a sentence and each person after only has the context of the previous sentence to write the next one, which makes for some real wild stories. If you can’t tell by the content of the pictured story, we are an odd bunch, our sometimes niche interests and occasionally bizarre senses of humor work well both for unique content in our stories and for forming friendships.
You as a writer may not have your own Writers’ Community, but want to find one to share your work with. Where do you start? This might be hard depending on your situation, but I highly recommend reaching out to others. Maybe your school has a creative writing club or you could start your own! If you’re an adult, try seeing if there’s a writing group you can join on social media or a blog (wink). I often hear that writing is a solitary art and that may be true to a point, but personally, if I didn’t have the friends I made in Writers’ Community to write with, I wouldn’t be a writer. See you next week when I talk about feedback and how to account for that in your own writing.