I hope you enjoyed the first post in the series! This post will discuss meetings,  the jobs of each group member, and how to organize your meetings.

Meetings
    The Qpk Society has several times when we meet up  - Christmas, and other holidays where we are all together, the Family/Memorial Day weekend, and at the end of the summer. Sometimes we also meet over Skype. It is difficult to meet regularly because we don't live in the same city, but we keep in touch as often as we can, and often send pieces of our writing through email so other group members can read them. 
    When creating a group, if everyone in your group lives in the same area, it is ideal to meet once a week, or once every two weeks. Make sure you find a time when everyone in your group is available. On days when you don't meet, make sure that you work on your work-in-progress so that you can discuss it at the next meeting. The way we make sure we don't use up our writing time because of our meetings is to have two meetings a day when we are all together. Our first meeting takes place from 3:45pm until 5:00pm. At this meeting, we do writing activities and all the things mentioned in the meeting post. The next meeting time goes from after dinner until we go to bed. This time is called Reading and Writing Hour, where we spend time working on our novels or stories, or reading. At various intervals, we stop and read parts of what we've just written to entertain everyone, and to get feedback. It is a good idea to meet with your group to do a version of Reading and Writing Hour because it allows you to have an audience for your work. Plus, if you don't feel comfortable sharing your work, you always have the option of just working on your writing and not sharing.

Whoa thats a lot about meetings. Briefly, enjoy this picture of a cute cat in a box!


Awww...kitty :)

Now, back to the post.

The Jobs of Group Members
    To keep our meetings running smoothly, each group member has certain jobs that they do in the meeting and to prepare for the meeting.

President - M
I'm the president of the group, which means I have to make sure everyone is prepared and on time for the meeting. I also have to plan out the order in which the meeting will go, and speak at the start of each meeting about what the goal of the meeting is. As you have probably noticed, I'm also the primary poster on the blog.

Vice President - S
S is the vice president of the group. She helps the President organise group events and makes sure the room where we meet is set up for our meetings. She also dicusses with the President what the goals for the group are, and updates we should make to the website.

Secretary - R
R deals with concerns related to people outside our group. She organizes when we have visitors, and makes sure the visitors are signed in and prepared for the meetings. R also does the words of the day at every meeting.

Assistant/Alternate - K
Whenever one of the other group members needs help with an activity or if they aren't able to attend the meeting, K fills in for them.

In addition to these jobs, each group member prepares an activity for the group to do.

Planning Your Meetings

Everyone has a preference about how things are organized, so you will have to discuss an order of events for your meetings with all the group members.

Here is a typical plan for the QPK Meeting:

Opening announcements - M - We usually just repeat the group motto and slogan and dicuss what we are going to do at the meeting.

Words of the Day - R - R chooses three words from Reggie and reads them to us with a definition so we can write them down.

*NEW* Writing News - Alternates Members at Each Meeting -  This new part of the meetings, which we will start at the next meeting, is where we find articles about writing in the newpaper or online and share them with the group.

Free write - Find a pencil or pen and paper. Set a timer for five minutes. Write whatever comes into your head and don't lift your pencil from the page. If you think: eat to like the cookies and the bullfrogs that sing when the breeze goes the trees that are glowing red and orange, write that down. Write anything and everything that comes into your head. It doesn't have to be gramatically correct.

K - K does her activity with the group. The order in which we do our activities changes at each meeting.

R - Activity.

S - Activity.

M- Activity.

Extras - Anyone else who wants to do an activity can do theirs at this time.

Closing announcements - We generally talk about what we learned from the meeting, what our favourite parts were, and what our goal is at Reading and Writing Hour.

Your meeting can include any or all of these activities, plus anything that you want to add that we don't have. For the activities, you can use activities that we talk about in our meeting posts, or ones that we post on the activities blog. I'm sorry that there are not many up there right now, but as the summer progresses, we'll add some more.

In the last post in the series, I'll be talking about special activities that you can do with your writing group, and some other things to consider when creating your group.

In the comments, we'd love to hear some suggestions from you about what we should add to our meetings. We're always interested in new ideas!

Hope you got some great ideas from this post!

 -M




 
Hello fellow writers! This is the first post in a new series about how to make your own writing group. With each post, we will give you tips and suggestions on finding members, picking a name, finding a time to meet, and how to organize your meetings, as well as how we started our group last year. I hope you enjoy what we have to say, and start your own group using the advice.

I love to write. It's something I couldn't imagine not doing. Growing up, I read soooo many books that I couldn't have avoided inspiration, and sure enough, it came pounding into my head. Also, having a grandmother that is a writer really helped. When I found out that my three cousins shared this love of writing, we started having reading and writing hour every night at our cottage. After several years of this, I came up with the idea of creating a writing group. When I shared this idea with my cousins, they all loved it.

The first thing we did was pick a meeting place and a name, the name being one of the most fun experiences in creating our group. We chose to meet in a small room in the basement of our cottage, away from the noise of a house buzzing with the sounds of our family. When you are choosing a place to meet with your group, here are some factors to consider:
1. Enough room for all your group members.
2. Away from noise and distractions
3. Out of the way of your family.
4. A place that appeals to your creative mind.

Next, the name, the motto or slogan, and other fun things...
As you know, the name that we chose for our group is The Quill, Pen and Keyboard Society, but before we found this name, we went through many others. To decide on names, we split into two groups of two, and went off on our own for a little while to brainstorm.  Then, we reconvened and presented our ideas. It came down to two names, the one we have now, and The Literettes (literacy, all girls). After much deliberation, our name was chosen, because Literettes sounded more like a group based around reading, and The Quill, Pen and Keyboard Society, suggested writing.

Next, we split up again and tried to come up with our motto and our slogan. We finally found ones that we liked:
Motto: Peace, Love, Write. (as shown on our home page).
Slogan: Ideas today, bestsellers tomorrow (because ideas were what we had and we aspire to publish our writing).
For these, think of things that you want your group to truly represent. If you are religious, you might want to include that. If you write a certain genre of fiction, put that in your slogan or motto.
Last, we created a group pledge. I'll post this sometime, but I don't have it written down near me right now. Each group member had to hold a pencil, and say the pledge (a little cheesey, I know, but it was fun). We also named our dictionary at this time. We added a bonus rule to our pledge for him:
Respect Reggie.
I don't know how we came up with Reggie as the name for our dictionary. It might have been based on the Archie comics. Having a name for our dictionary was humorous of course, but it also reminded us to look in the dictionary for words, and value the power of language. 'Respect Reggie' doesn't just mean 'Respect the Dictionary', it means respect language, and realize how powerful it is. 

I hope you enjoyed the post, and are inspired to start your own group.
The next post in the series will be on meetings and organizing them, and the jobs of each member. 

Happy writing,
-M


 
When I was writing the first draft of my novel, I more or less wrote by the seat of my pants - no outline whatsoever. Sure, there were those two scribbled pages with a few character names on them, but that doesn't count for much. I planned from the start that I'd write in whatever direction my story took me, and go back later to fix the plot and characters. It worked fairly well. I finished the draft in exactly a year to the day. It was then that I looked back at my work and said "Goodness gracious I should have mapped this thing out from the start." But it was too late. I'd have to do it the hard way.
          One of the tools I used to get my novel on  the right track was a story map. It would have been great, I realized, to have this from the beginning. I made my story map on a large piece of newsprint. it looked something like a triangle, with a few jagged edges to represent obstacles, with the climax at the triangle's point. Using sticky notes, I wrote out various events that happened in my story, and stuck them to them map in chronological order. Instantly, things became clearer, and  I could see the holes in my story and began to revise accordingly.
    Even if you don't like planning, I strongly suggest using this form of an outline to give you an idea before you write, of the main events that will occur  in your story. 
Have Fun!
-M