KimElliott.net

A few years ago, I started a writing group with a friend. There were just the two of us and we eagerly went about thinking up a name for ourselves and photocopying little flyers to leave at the library (her idea) and in unsold writing books at Waterstones (my idea).

We advertised on a couple of writing sites, asking interested people to email us and then we’d reveal exactly which Starbucks in central London we were lounging in. The idea was to meet each week with other potential novelists, learn from them and get used to working to a deadline.

It didn’t quite end up like that.

My friend and I were very different; we’d worked together for a couple of years and only really started to plan the writing group after I’d moved to a new job. She was developing a teen horror about steamy young vampires who didn’t have sex and I was writing a gritty coming of age novel about a boy in a dress.

It was because we were so different we thought one of us would always be able to relate to a new member. Like a couple of teenage girls dreaming of their future prince charmings, we’d sit in the café, whispering about who would walk in the door and plonk a future orange prize novel onto the coffee table.

We didn’t meet any princes. We met an apprentice quilt maker writing a novel about a quilt making teacher, a ‘woman’ who had written a work of fiction about a transvestite and a lady who’d written a murder mystery without a murder (the deceased had committed suicide).

The most impressive was a man who had supposedly written seven novels, but had systematically destroyed them all. Some he burned, some he lost, others the PC destroyed and one – his cleaner accidentally threw away. Needless to say, despite claiming to have an agent, the man had no writing to show us.

We were ready to give up, but somehow amongst all these crazy people, three of four normal writers had joined the group and stuck around. For a couple of years we met once a week and I learnt more from them than I ever could sitting in a room blindly typing away alone.

Gradually, things started to change. The once dedicated writers in our group stopped well, writing. We tried solving the problems but nothing seemed to work. To make matters worse, the writers who didn’t write stopped reading the novels of the other people in the group. Soon everyone was suggesting going to the pub for a quick pint where we could all gossip about how to accept the booker prize.

These people who didn’t write still wanted to come to the writing group, but it wasn’t about feedback on their novels anymore. It was about pretending to be a writer and our weekly meetings weren’t anything more than group therapy.

When one of the group members, a good friend of mine, was the first to finish her novel in the group, I decided to keep my head down and finish my own book. I left the group I founded. The friend who’d started things off with me had left a few years before so it felt pretty strange to walk away from something we’d began knowing it was still going on without either of us.

I finished my first book, got an agent and got on with being a writer. The group still meet when they can, although from what they tell me it’s pretty sporadic, with days and times and venues changing week to week.

When they do manage to get together, I think it works well. I learnt a lot in the group, my writing improved thanks to honest feedback, I got more disciplined having to deliver on a deadline and I realised that if you want to finish what you start, writing is always going to be about sitting alone in a room, night after night, with a laptop and an idea.