In the past I joined all kinds of assorted groups in hopes of learning something important. I took part in a dream group, a journal writing group, a woman’s group, a belly dance group, an improv acting group and a writers group along with others.
I did take away quite a lot of knowledge and personal growth depending on the group and the instructor of the group. I tried attending groups where I had to pay a facilitator or teacher to teach the group. I also attended groups composed of my peers where we were doing it for fun, led it ourselves and didn’t have to pay anyone.
In college I had to take part in a writers group that was part of my full course of classes, what they called a ‘program’ at my college. This was a journal writing shop that was led by a highly skilled instructor. But I did also notice that she heavily utilized a book about how to lead yourself on a journal writing journey.
When I was done with school and moved to a city, this gave me an idea. I was composing a lot of poetry plus short, true stories and by that time I had tried out a bunch of different types of support groups for writing. I didn’t want to pay anyone to be in a writers group at that time because I couldn’t afford to.
I asked a few of my friends if they wanted to build our own group together. We would get together once a week at a local café and choose writing exercises from several good books.
Three of us ended up doing this for more than a year. Everyone else quit, but we all liked it enough and got enough diversity from it that we just wanted to keep on working. We tried a lot of different types of writing and we all felt that our writing skills developed in leaps and bounds from trying different things plus getting feedback from one another.
It was fun, plus if we didn’t feel that much like writing we could always just talk to each other and drink coffee. I became much closer with these friends than I expected to, and we maintained a friendship beyond writing after schedules changed and we determined not to continue on with the group.
One of the lessons I learned from this was that selecting an activity that you usually have to pay money to learn and facilitating it yourself is both fun and effective. And it can have extra benefits such as adding interest to the rest of your life and increasing friendships.
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