avatarAngie Vincent

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Communal Writing, It’s When The Magic Happens

Coming together in writerly support

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

Writing is a solitary pursuit, it involves hours, and days of being alone. Sitting with the words, urging them to come, moving them around, twisting them, playing with them.

The writing life is not a life for those who crave chatter and company.

Yet, sometimes, even for those of us who embrace the solitude, and bask in the aloneness, a wisp of conversation or an acknowledgement that what we are doing isn’t just fluff is needed. Connection is required, and a mutual understanding which can only come from those also wrestling with sentences and ideas, and nouns and verbs.

Like a river, my creativity ebbs and flows, some days I overflow with ideas and words gush onto the page, and I’m unable to get them down quickly enough. On other days, my words are barely a trickle and I am blocked by a metaphorical damn. It is on those dry days, the aloneness at the desk is the hardest. This is when I need my creative source to be refilled by community, not just any community, but a community of other writers.

A year ago, I joined The Confident Creative Club. Since then, I have discovered that writing with a small group of other women produces a particular kind of writerly magic.

As a community of writing women, we began as strangers, isolated and contained in our little on screen boxes. To some extent we still are. We are spread across the globe, we don’t know each other’s families or much about each other’s backgrounds, and we have mostly never met in real life.

Despite this we are a community we write together, we share the ups and the downs of the words we want to write and the words we can’t get written. We sit quietly for an hour in a session of communal writing, knowing that for some of us, maybe all of us, magic is about to happen.

There is infinite reassurance in looking up and seeing others, writing, twiddling pens or hair, typing or thinking, or drinking tea from cups which we recognise from hours of writing together, and are now almost as familiar as our own. With our crumpled foreheads and furrowed brows we silently and consistently urge one another on.

We may have never visited one another’s homes and yet we have a snapshot of each of them, whenever we look up from our own writing and towards the screen. We regularly see backdrops of neat or messy bookshelves which have become part of our community landscape. Blurred pictures and photographs of people we don’t know, pot plants and flowers, candles and coffee cups are a window into writerly lives which have become marvellously tangled with our own.

We are linked across countries and continents in our desire to be present, to write together, and to work together. As we finish our hour and stretch our necks and shoulder which have stiffened in our pursuit of words, we unmute ourselves and prepare to release the magic which has happened, as we share together our successes, and our struggles too.

On those weeks when work or other commitments prevents me from joining a communal writing session, my writerly productivity is reduced and my output is less. My river of creativity slowly and surely begins to dry up, and frustration sets in. To be the best writer I can, I need the sparks of magic which emanate from the screen, and from my community.

“When women support each other, incredible things happen”

Author unknown

When we show up together, we want to be the best we can be. We feel accountable to one another, and we support one another. These two things conspire to result in the discipline to conjure up something magical each and every time we meet.

Other Posts from me you might enjoy

The Magic of Writing in Coffee Shops

Using Conscious Creativity To Help Me Live a Creative Life

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