I'm actually the speaker at next month's author's group here in town. I went to last month's meeting and for about two minutes told the audience about my long history in publishing, including being the person who selected manuscripts for publication. Told them that at the next meeting, I would be speaking about shaping and editing manuscripts. As I left the meeting, two women sort of bumped into me. "I have something else to do that day," said one. "So do I," said the other.
Not really surprising. I basically tell people to stay away from writers' groups, because you won't find any writers there. Even funnier, I was introduced to a woman in a small but wonderful town in CA. When she heard that I had just left my job as editorial director of a well-known publishing house, she pulled herself up, got really huffy and fumed, "Well, I'VE been to ten writers' conferences.
You get the picture.
I’m in a town where everybody’s a writer. Like L.A. where every taxi driver and waiter is a screenwriter. There is a writer group here that meets every Wednesday evening in a crowded cafe with bad acoustics where a dozen of the 20 or so attendees distribute copies of their scribbles (an expensive requirement), read them and then invite critique. I am a member of it, though I haven’s attended for a couple of years, but I get e-mail notifications thrice weekly. I never read there, attended two or three meetings, which was sufficient, and went to another group which had 3-4 attendees and met on Tuesdays at the same place. That one’s defunked, as its leader who used it to get help editing his New Age masterpiece, finally published it had a baby or two, and went on the speaker’s circuit.
Anyway, the larger group was/is led by a published Israeli-American writer, a moonbat to a high degree who wants to change the world with his writings, he says, a nice guy otherwise, and not a terribly good writer, but, as I said, published, not self-published. The attendees were mostly middle aged or older people, most of them writing mysteries, fashioned after famous mystery writers, and not altogether bad. One guy was writing a western, quite good, engaging, lots of detail, good characters (I think he was a retired journalist or something), and I thought what is he doing among these amateurs. All in all, it wasn’t as bad as you suggest, or as bad as my smaller Tuesday group of mostly random irregulars.
The problem with writing, as I see it, is that it’s so easy, anyone can do it, so many do it, the security guard at the company where I used to work, who ratted on me to the CEO after I was laid off, is a “writer” (self-published), I am a writer (published in magazines), my good friend for whom English is a third or fourth language, is a writer, a good one, but one who commits embarrassing grammar and spelling errors that he doesn’t ask me to correct, so I don’t. But I read top shelf literature, unlike many people who read junk, which convinces them, as it would anyone, that they can do better, while my top shelf stuff tells me I can’t do chit!
I wrote a post-modern story yesterday. A story, you might say, about itself.
Cheers.
I’m in a town where everybody’s a writer. Like L.A. where every taxi driver and waiter is a screenwriter. There is a writer group here that meets every Wednesday evening in a crowded cafe with bad acoustics where a dozen of the 20 or so attendees distribute copies of their scribbles (an expensive requirement), read them and then invite critique. I am a member of it, though I haven’s attended for a couple of years, but I get e-mail notifications thrice weekly. I never read there, attended two or three meetings, which was sufficient, and went to another group which had 3-4 attendees and met on Tuesdays at the same place. That one’s defunked, as its leader who used it to get help editing his New Age masterpiece, finally published it had a baby or two, and went on the speaker’s circuit.
Anyway, the larger group was/is led by a published Israeli-American writer, a moonbat to a high degree who wants to change the world with his writings, he says, a nice guy otherwise, and not a terribly good writer, but, as I said, published, not self-published. The attendees were mostly middle aged or older people, most of them writing mysteries, fashioned after famous mystery writers, and not altogether bad. One guy was writing a western, quite good, engaging, lots of detail, good characters (I think he was a retired journalist or something), and I thought what is he doing among these amateurs. All in all, it wasn’t as bad as you suggest, or as bad as my smaller Tuesday group of mostly random irregulars.
The problem with writing, as I see it, is that it’s so easy, anyone can do it, so many do it, the security guard at the company where I used to work, who ratted on me to the CEO after I was laid off, is a “writer” (self-published), I am a writer (published in magazines), my good friend for whom English is a third or fourth language, is a writer, a good one, but one who commits embarrassing grammar and spelling errors that he doesn’t ask me to correct, so I don’t. But I read top shelf literature, unlike many people who read junk, which convinces them, as it would anyone, that they can do better, while my top shelf stuff tells me I can’t do chit!
I wrote a post-modern story yesterday. A story, you might say, about itself.
Cheers.