Being Apart of A Writing Group

My biggest goal when I came to college was to find a group of students who loved writing books as much as I did. When I went to the Org. Fair a week into my freshman year, I was so excited to walk in and find a club. I was highly disappointed when I walked out of the fair with no novel writing club in sight.

I was so upset about this that I ended up ranting to my mentor, a Junior named Meg. After listening to my spiel, she told me there was an unofficial writing group on campus that met once a month to talk about the progress they made on their novels. I was immediately intrigued and when she confirmed with her friends that I could join, I was so excited.

A year later, I had spent so much time with these girls that I knew when they graduated, I would be so disappointed. So, I reached out to a few friends of mine and talked to them about joining our mini group as well. The girls I had been talking too were so focused on graduation, grad-school, studying abroad, and life after college that we'd barely met at all that first semester. By the time the second semester rolled around, I was no longer the youngest person in that group, but had pulled in three freshman girls that were just as excited to talk about writing as I was.

The group had been dubbed Writers Anonymous by one of the seniors because we were a support group for writers. When I talked to the other freshman girls, we all knew other people who were as excited about writing as we were. We wanted to make it an official group, and we were ready to fill out the paperwork. So, we did.

It took about three months for everything to go through, but when it did, we found that there were a lot of people on campus, ranging from freshman to seniors, who were just as ready to write books as we were. Everyone was at different stages of the process too, which meant we had students who had never written anything to students who had self-published their own work.

Being apart of the group gave me a sense of community. Writing can often be a lonely task, but all of a sudden, I had a group of people around me that understood the frustrations of writer's block, imposter syndrome, and the woes of procrastination. We all understood one another's problems and helped each other through them.

Now, our meetings are an hour and a half on Tuesdays from 8-9:30. We sit down together for the first half-hour and talk about what we've been working on. We set goals with one another and hold each other accountable to them the following week. We have found community in talking through the struggles of being a writer with each other. And then for the next hour, we write.

As any writer knows, the hardest part of being a writer is forcing yourself to sit down and write. It's so much easier to relax and daydream about this great idea you have bouncing around your head than it is to actually put the words on paper.

Writers Anonymous has done so many amazing things for me. I have found people that understand the way my brain works, I have found accountability in people who know my struggles, and I have found a group of college-students willing to cheer me on through it all.