Coalitions of the willing
Writers’ groups are ‘coalitions of the willing’ in two respects: those who are willing to run them and those who are willing to be part of them. The default democratic model for such organisations has it that those who run the group are elected from its membership by its members. This depends on members being willing to be elected and, ideally, enough people standing to make the election a contest. This is fanciful. The true situation (and this is not just true of writers’ groups) is that some are willing to run a group and others are willing to participate in its activities.
Apart from the fast-abandoned networking organisation I’ve already described, there have been several other local groups with similar remits to Southwest Scriptwriters that have formed and faded throughout my group’s history. The more memorable of these were a spinoff group assembled to focus on screenwriting, a handpicked group of more established writers, and a group of graduates of a scriptwriting course. All three groups closed following the resignation of their founders except the handpicked association, which lost momentum after its convenor called it a day and it slowed to a halt not long thereafter.
The danger of drawing attention to the demise of other groups is that it recalls the petty resentment of The People’s Front of Judea in the famous ‘splitters’ scene of Monty Python’s Life of Brian.[1] I’m offering these examples, though, not out of small-minded schadenfreude, but because they illustrate my point about groups coalescing around those who are prepared to run them. (And I mean the simple fact that the organisers are prepared to put in the admin work, not that they form the centre of personality cults!)
‘Not that it takes much organising…’
I was once introduced at a social gathering as follows: ‘This is Tim. He organises Southwest Scriptwriters — not that it takes much organising…’ I suppose that, superficially, writers’ groups don’t seem to need a lot of effort to make meetings happen — it’s just a bunch of people in a room talking about writing, after all. Despite appearances, the work involved in booking a room in which to meet, making sure that there is writing to be talked about, and assembling the people to talk about it is significant.
For much of its history, Southwest Scriptwriters has had the benefit of meeting in landmark venues in central Bristol. Such meeting places are neither cheap nor are they readily available for booking. By working flexibly with the organisations and businesses that manage the venues, though, we’ve been able to find spaces to meet at little or no cost — the group has only very limited funds for rental payments.
Having negotiated a prestigious venue in which to meet, the pressure’s on to make the meeting worthy of the location. Writers’ groups are driven by their members’ productivity, which has a tendency to lurch from feast to famine. Even when a writer has asked to air work, this can still prove a tentative arrangement needing extra encouragement to be sure the writer arrives at a meeting with the promised output. It’s wise to have some backup material to spring should the scheduled work not materialise and you’re facing a roomful of expectant writers with nothing to share.
In some respects having a roomful of people with nothing to discuss is less frustrating than the opposite. Bringing together a decent meeting place with a promising piece of writing to explore only to find that very few show because it’s a wet November Wednesday feels like so much wasted effort. Having a full house but no material is proof at least that you’ve done your (additional) job of getting the word out about the meeting and that there are people ready to attend — although you may have just lost this audience because of your failure to line anything up for the session.
And all the above effort just gets you to the ‘Minimum Service Level’ for your writers’ group. To make it a more vibrant operation you’ll need to programme special events like talks from established writers and look at doing extracurricular projects that require Byzantine funding applications. Before you know it, an activity that ‘doesn’t take much organising’ turns into an unpaid part-time (or more) job.
If, on attending a writers’ group meeting for the first time, you find yourself thinking that it’s not up to much and you could organise something better yourself — how hard can it be? — it’s worth considering whether there’s anything you can suggest to help make the existing group more to your liking. On joining Southwest Scriptwriters my focus was on developing my scriptwriting skills, not on being a social entrepreneur. And that is what you become if you commit to running a writers’ group. This might seem self-aggrandising, but the job involves your risking time, effort, and energy to voluntarily create opportunities for other writers. Of course, you’re also creating those opportunities for yourself, but you’ll need to keep the benefits you reap at least equivalent to those garnered by your group members or risk losing them. This is a mistake that Adrian Mole has made, although his absence of self-awareness keeps him from recognising it:
[…] I thought back to the glory days of the Leicestershire and Rutland Creative Writing Group, when the members would sit enraptured for hours, listening to my novel, Lo, the Flat Hills of My Homeland.
‘We had started out with sixteen members, but these rapidly dwindled, and now there was just me and Ken.[3]
Notes and references
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