In the past I joined all kinds of different groups in hopes of learning something important. I took part in a dream group, a journal writing group, a womans group, a belly dancing group, an improv acting group and a writers group among others.
I did take away quite a lot of knowledge and personal growth depending on the group and the teacher of the group. I tried attending groups where I had to pay a facilitator or teacher to lead 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 learning, what they called a ‘program’ at my college. This was a journal writing workshop that was led by a highly skilled teacher. 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 writing 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 point because I couldn’t afford to.
I asked a bunch of my friends if they wanted to form our own group together. We would meet 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 dropped out, but we all liked it enough and got enough variety from it that we just wanted to keep on going. We tried a lot of different types of writing and we all felt that our writing skills grew in leaps and bounds from trying new things plus getting feedback from each other.
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 women than I expected to, and we maintained a friendship beyond writing after schedules changed and we decided not to continue on with the group.
One of the lessons I learned from this was that choosing 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 perking friendships.
