Running a Writing Club

Intro

To begin with, a writing club is a counterintuitive group. To write is an activity that is most productive when you’re alone with no distractions. Reading someone’s writing is also a solo activity.

Whenever I share my writing in person, I have to leave the room in anxious embarrassment. When I read aloud, I begin to feel bad and tired if it’s a long story.

So with that in mind, a group of introverted strangers meeting up to write together is a little odd.

But I think that’s actually where the Writing Club really shines. It’s unlike most clubs at University. Other clubs are physically active, serious and competitive, or too broad of social circle like the music club (who doesn’t like music -> way to broad). The Writing Club is the opposite of all that, it’s chill to the point of lazy, and writing is almost as broad as like music or Christianity, but it’s just a little more specific enough that though everyone in the club are quite different people, we all almost all get along.

In today’s essay, we will be examining my personal opinion of what worked and doesn’t work in the Writing Club. It is split into the two main parts of the club: writing and socializing.

1. Writing

As said before, writing in a group makes no sense. But that’s the excuse we use to meet up every week, so we may as well talk about it.

I’ve been asked what we do in the writing club. I’d usually answer with something like this, “Oh we talk about movies and TV usually.” Though it’s a joke, it’s not a complete like that writing isn’t involved.

What does the Writing Club actually do?

Though it’s been varied throughout the years and presidents, it’s been fairly uninventive in it’s tradition.

The ideal boring meeting goes like this:

1. Post ahead what the topic of today’s meeting online. It’s gets people excited and makes the club look more professional.

2. Start with a small blurb talking about a topic, say it’s focused on settings and the description around it. Analyze it’s value and importance. (I always think it’s neat to decipher something we take for granted and determine why it’s good/bad.)

3. Now that we understand what we’re talking about, read some excerpts from real books. Doesn’t matter if it’s a good or bad writing. One of the most important parts of writing is reading. However this part does take effort to know your topic ahead of time and have a memory of good excerpts from books you’ve read.

4. Prompt time! Give a prompt related to the topic. Now that we’ve all talked and read about a certain topic, our minds are ready to write about it and it’s easier to get an idea than being given a random prompt out of the blue. Our brain is stretched and hungry to write at this point.

5. Sharing! Now it’s time to talk about why I hate this format of meetings.

My least favourite part of the writing club is actually the whole prompt writing and sharing section. I don’t like writing something completely random and only having ten minutes to think of an idea and write. Quick prompt writing is really hard.

When I first joined I was really shy and pretty inexperienced. I don’t remember writing anything (let alone sharing it) for the whole first semester until I gained confidence. And that was when the club was much smaller.

Now that I’ve been doing these dumb prompts for several years, I’ve finally cracked the code it’s quite easy for me to consistently be able to kill it at any prompt. It’s when I realized that these prompts boil down to being able to write a joke in ten minutes. Keep it simple, make it as weird as possible so it’s unique, and end it with a punchline. It’s pump and dump writing. Write once, hope to get a laugh from everyone, then forget about it.

Of course there’s always the exception, someone is able to write something actually really good in that time frame, but I find almost all the time the popular ones are just weird meaningless jokes. The rest are boring and bad (which is to be expected with these high demands). How else can you write a beginning - middle - end story in just ten minutes.

What is the goal of these prompts. Sure it gives us something to do but so does everything in life. There have been some successful meetings when good writing has been written and all that stretching of the writing muscles has sparked the need to want to write more. The meeting ends with people saying, “I’m going to go home and write tonight.” That’s the goal.

Getting side tracked.

Then there’s the sharing. I don’t really remember this being a problem before, but now that the club is so much larger with 10+ members, the sharing part is quite long and overburdening.

I enjoy listening to good stories, they’re fun and easy to listen to. I also enjoy reading my writing aloud because I love my ego being boosted. But I really find it tough to listen to multiple bad stories back to back to back to…

And it’s not their fault that the story is bad. As mentioned above, it’s hard to not be bad if you haven’t written much and then are forced to write something related to a prompt and are given ten minutes to do so. Half of writing is thinking and the other half is editing, neither of which have room in this time frame.

Here are the current outcomes:

• Someone reads out a great story (Great!)
• A not so great story is read and I lose focus. Speaking skill also play a role into this.
• Someone shares their premise, but didn’t actually write anything. This is a failed prompt if the goal is to write.
• They don’t share. (Epic fail)

Solutions:

• Better prompts. A random prompt out of the blue is too open and hard. But the opposite can be just as hard: a prompt too specific. You have to ease people into the prompt, by have a discussion around it first with examples and stuff.
• Change the length to write. This is kind of tricky actually. Give too much time and people are going to write very long stories and the reading aloud part becomes even more hellish as I lose focus on everything. Give less time and no one has time to think let alone write. So force a word limit. If people are limited then they have to write more efficiently. Fast writers get time to edit. And don’t worry about the people who write by hand, they’ll never have time to write anything long.
• Groups. Split people up and have them read to each other. Shy people might actually feel comfortable to share.
• All the above solutions are bandaid fixes. The problems might be mitigated, but they will still be there. The only real solution is to get rid of it entirely.

On Reading Aloud

My favorite writing moment was reading aloud a story for a contest. It was hosted by the English department (the Writing Club actually had a meeting at the same time so epic fail for them being separate instead of together). It was at one of the now closed bars on campus, and I was standing on the stage at a microphone in front of a bunch of strangers. It was a Halloween contest and I was reading a really gross part I wrote and someone in the audience actually gasped. Never did I know writing could entail such a thrill.

Of course there’s a lot of boring background to this. It took a week to think and write the story. I failed a thermodynamics midterm because I wrote the story instead of studying. I practiced reading in front of a mirror several times. And there was only one other competitor so no one was tired from hearing story after story. Regardless, that gasp while reading was something special for me.

Half the reason a story is good when read aloud is just the speaking skills. Doesn’t matter how good the writing is if the reader is quiet and can’t read their own handwriting. I used to be like that, I had someone make fun of me for being super monotone. But after all the years of doing these prompts my reading skills have greatly improved (the trick is to read slowly with lots of dramatic pauses).

So while on one hand people reading aloud is mostly a painful dull experience, it has been an invaluable skill that I gained from doing all those prompts. Or was it from the time I spent reading aloud contests…

Contests

Why are we just talking about contests now? Contests are the best part of the Writing Club. I didn’t know I could write until I tried a contest and then I was hooked. One time someone who never showed up to a meeting submitted to a contest, won, and then started attending only later to actually become an exec. Contests are important!

Contests are a great motivator, to force people to sit down and write a completed beginning middle end story and hopefully have it edited and polished. Almost all my actually finished stories are because of contests.

And nothing is more validating to your writing if you win. At that moment, you really do feel like a writer.

Execs will always say stuff like “man we should really have another contest but we’re soo lazy.” I don’t really know how this happened because creating a writing contest is the easiest thing in the world. You just take your old contest announcement and just resend it with a different prompt and submission date. The hard part is reading the submissions.

Getting five contest submissions is fun. It’s a joy to read people’s personal writing, you kind of get to peer inside their subconscious.

Reading 10+ submissions is hell. With each story being 1500 words, you’ll end up skimming and only looking for the best one. It takes time and motivation is going to be low when reading amateur work when you’re busy.

But what’s even harder than reading submissions is giving feedback. Well, actually it’s easy to give feedback to the story that’s actually good. When you can get technical with specific sections that can improve the story.

Writing feedback for stories that you don’t like or are confusing is really hard. There’s nothing to critique except to just delete the whole thing! (that’s an extreme but not far from the truth).

Also that begs the question, whether it’s good or bad, how deep of a critique do you go? I found that the better a story was, the easier it was to give specific critiques cause I was constantly saying how much I liked it. Bad stories you give more motivating bullshit stuff like, “this sounds like a great beginning of a story…”

We’re not professional editors. We have zero skills at analyzing someone’s writing and saying why it’s good or bad.

But here’s a tip: saying what parts are good and work is more important than saying what parts didn’t. “Loved this part” is the best critique an amateur can give.

Sideline:

I once attended a writing workshop that was run by the writer in resident at the University. A real writer that was teaching writing at the university. This was during COVID so the workshop was a zoom meeting of students sharing work. Even the professional writer/instructor wasn’t great at giving on the fly feedback. Feedback on the fly is finding a standout section that you can make a positive funny remark about, “The protagonist doing that funny thing sure is funny eh.”

It reminded me of giving feedback in the writing club. Feedback is showing that you listened/read the whole story, which in itself can be challenging.

End sideline.

I think it boils down to time. Reading 1500 words can be hard and take up time especially when it’s confusingly written. And then critiquing it (for me at least) requires another whole read through trying to find parts that made it work/didn’t. Doing that for each story is incredibly draining and time consuming.

I think the solution is getting all the execs together, and just getting it done.

Sharing Writing

The Writing Club has a great lack of sharing writing. Not the ten minute prompt writing, I’m talking about sharing personal long pieces. There’s no encouragement or opportunity to do so. Sure, there’s the discord “project-dump” thread, but it’s so lame. Just a boring chat list of people sharing PDFs. No excitement. I almost never read anything posted there because why would I?

The club used to have these Hot Chocolate and Chill meetings (who knows why they were called that). These meetings were made in advance, there was a Facebook event made well ahead saying prepare some writing, either new or old, to share at the meetings with snacks and hot chocolate. It was a big event! Well not really, it was just a regular meeting + snacks. But the minor hype up made me feel good to share my writing at those events.

The club also used to have a website (actually it’s still around). That was the spot to post and share our writing. The execs used it, and in turn encouraged everyone to use it as well.

Again, publishing on the Writing Club’s website felt a little more prestigious compared to uploading a PDF to a chat thread. However now the Writing Club website is a little dated looking, ruins your stories format, and requires a signup. If only there was someone who made new websites…

Motivating Writing

I don’t think writing can be accomplished in the Writing Club (well I mean it could, it could start hour long writing sessions but that would be boring now wouldn’t it). The club is merely an excuse to socialize. However, if there must be writing in the the writing club, then it’s goal should be to have fun, and to motivate writing. As said earlier, an accomplished writing meeting is when someone says, “I’m going to write when I get home.”

Conclusion

I might sound completely anti-writing in the writing club, and that’s because I am. It’s boring!

The writing club has become too stagnant and boring. Prompt writing is only a problem because it’s currently all the club has. Every week, the same old thing over and over. Variety needs to be introduced. I know, easier said than done. It’s so easy to keep with the current quota. But sitting here reflecting on the club, all those prompt meetings have all blended into one boring meeting. They don’t stand out at all.

Well, thank goodness I’m not the president anymore and none of this is my responsibility to improve.

Notebooks

This is the intermission, where I’ll talk about notebooks as a reward for contests.

Notebooks are such a good reward for contests. A lot of amateur writers don’t have fancy notebooks because they’re pricey for just being paper, and a little pretentious. Yes it’s pretentious, but that’s the writer’s lifestyle. It feels great and I believe it’s a requirement of a writer to have a fancy overpriced notebook.

So what notebook to give? There’s two notebooks I love.

• Moleskine Cahier Soft Cover 7.5” x 9.75”. These usually come in a three or five pack and are actually pretty cheap. The quality is also cheap and it’s not pretentious, but this is my go to notebook. It’s the perfect size to actually get real writing done (I find the typical notebook size too small).
• Leuchtturn1917 notebooks. This is my favorite brand of notebooks. A5 is your classic notebook size, the quality is much higher with a nice leather cover, page numbers, and a little table of contents as a first page. You can find these at Indego, Staples, or the local store Perfect Books on Elgin. This was actually the first notebook I got when I won my first contest at the Writing Club. I’ve used a few different brands since, but this was my favorite.

Remembered Meetings

1. Old exec talked about character names. How you can really put effort into names with double meanings and all that. There were lots of examples. I think this was the only meeting that I learned something relevant in writing (although I’ve never done double meaning names yet).

2. Webmaster did a meeting about productivity. This one stands out because the webmaster never hosted a meeting and also this had almost no prompt. But scheduling productivity is key to a writing lifestyle. I found it to be one of the more interesting meetings.

3. Here’s what a boring meeting was like: topic is zombies. This meeting talked about zombie movies, zombie games, zombie lore. But no writing. No one fucking read a zombie book, and this degrades the club into a pop culture meeting which is very shallow if you’re not into zombies.

4. The meetings that had no writing but just social games to break the ice.

Part 2: Social

What is the social aspect of the writing club. It used to just be a bunch of friends hanging out on a weekday evening. This really worked when everyone had the same vibe and there was only like five members.

The club used to thrive on tangents. Talking about writing would somehow lead to someone talking about their upcoming blind date. But now a group of 10+ can’t casually hang out. It’s too large of a crowd and too many personalities. You can’t be “close” enough with this many strangers to share personal stuff or even to warrant taking up the spotlight.

One of the execs killed it with their catch phrase, “your 2 minutes of therapy is up”. It allowed people to rant a little, but also kept it short and sweet to not derail all 10+ members into one person’s life.

As it is, the only way the social aspect is working is that everyone splinters up into smaller groups. Works for me, but I see the shy ones leave without saying goodbye and I don’t blame them.

I don’t have a solution. Well actually I did. My solution was to not be inclusive, to wait for the club to thin out into smaller numbers.

For sake of thoroughness, here’s some remembered good and bad social moments.

Good

• When every member (all five of us) had a perfect vibe. Every meeting was chill and fun. No effort was required though I still prepped good meetings. It was something I looked forward to every week.
• Reading/hearing the writing of people I’m close with. It’s quite a treat to glimpse into a person’s uncensored mind.
• Fun times partying with members outside of meetings.

Bad

• Meetings with no chemistry. The prompt is boring, there’s no topic, and everyone leaves early cause there’s nothing to say.

• I’ve never really like the sleepover event. It’s too long and informal to hang out with people that I’m not close with. Though one time the sleepover ended early at midnight so I had an afterparty with just the close people. Wild time.

• Online. I find it incredibly hard to have chill conversations online.

Conclusion

I think this long winded report is all to say that the club has an overpopulation problem. No it’s not overpopulation, it’s the fact that the club has not adapted at all to the increase of members. The Writing Club is sticking to the same rules from over half a decade ago as if nothing has changed.

Everything I’ve experienced in the writing club is irrelevant to what the club is now.

So all I ask is to change up the formula. Pave new roads. Kick all of us old lazy execs out. Bring new blood into it. Don’t keep doing the same meeting because of tradition or lack of creativity to think of something new. Please!