The Blank Page

This post is about the nitty gritty of running a group and the little details that can make all the difference. You’ll know best what will work for your group, this is just how we run ours:

Time:

We have 2 hours, broken up roughly as follows –

• 20 minutes to chat and get settled
• 1 hour of quiet writing time
• 30 minutes to read aloud and give feedback

Rules:

One of the things we stress is that it’s their club. When we started, we drew up a ‘group contract’, giving the kids the opportunity to say what they wanted from the group, including things like ‘you can sit where you like’ and ‘shoes need not be worn’. (They could also come up with their own group name.) Changes and issues are run past the group and agreed by them.

Over time the contract has boiled down to one rule, which is ‘It’s up to you what you write and whether you write, but you can’t disturb anyone else’s writing time’. Generally that’s the only rule we’ve needed. If someone doesn’t feel like writing that’s fine, we all have days like that. They can read, draw, do emergency homework. But they can’t disturb anyone else.

The rules apply to the adults too. We don’t use their meeting time to have a chat because that would distract the kids and I feel it’s also a bit disrespectful. We’re at their club, not in our classroom.

This is a fun and easy exercise to introduce the idea of having a healthy attitude to writing competitions.

Some of the young writers I work with love entering competitions. Some are currently working on submissions to the Irish Times, and a couple were included in an anthology put together by Fighting Words Belfast which is launching tonight.

If I come across a competition I usually do mention it to my young writers in case they’re interested, but I also do this exercise with them, because it’s a bit of fun and it gives a really good insight into how competitions work.

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I am loathe to tell a young writer what to write, but I do try to introduce them to different forms of writing because one size does not fit all and it may be that any creative paralysis they’re experiencing could simply be because they are poets, not playwrights, or novelists, not short story writers.

The English curriculum covers novels, poems and plays. Maybe a short story or two. YA publishing doesn’t cover much more than this either. There are very few short story collections for teens, never mind anything more experimental. Which means there are so many forms and genres out there that they haven’t even heard of, and one of them just might be their writing comfort zone.

For example, there’s Memoir, Prose-Poetry, The Personal Essay, Flash Fiction, Novellas, Micro Fiction, Radio Drama, Spoken Word Poetry, Creative Non-Fiction, TV Scripts, Graphic Novels, Video Game Writing, Blogging, Fan Fiction, Nature Writing…

There’s even ‘Twitterature’.

And probably more, not to mention all the variation and genres within these. Some of the more uncommon things produced at our writing club have included:

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