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Note on writing groups

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Writing is often a solitary activity, so there can be lots of advantages to joining writing groups. You can share your work and ideas with others, be stimulated by other people’s viewpoints and words or by trying out writing exercises. Sometimes you can even try to co-write. Plenty of people, perhaps most famously Wordsworth and Coleridge have co-written poetry.

The following joint poems were written by six of us in about half an hour sitting round my granite table. The idea was to borrow aspects of the Haiku form.. i.e. to write a short observation in three lines. This was then passed on to the next person, who read what was written, added three lines of their own, and so on until the final person had the responsibility of ‘rounding off’ the poem.

The advantages of exercises like this is that you have to think quickly and flexibly, and incorporate your thinking and writing style with somebody else’s! I believe it takes you out of what can sometimes be a solipsistic poetic rut, and allows your imagination to explore sidetracks that it might not otherwise have done.

If anyone is interested in supportive writing groups, e-mail [email protected]

The four poems that follow were jointly written as a group exercise by Angela Stoner, Janet Cox, Valery Cons, Jenny Hamlett and Maureen Mason.

 

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