This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 35: The Power Of A Writers’ Group.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and I have a super fluffy co host with me in my makeshift recording booth tonight. I have recorded episodes with her in here before and despite having the love of a loyal animal companion, hanging out with me while I do this, she also makes a great dampener, but caveat, if you hear little bumps or purring sounds, that’s my cat Midori. She’s friendly.

If you’re allergic to cats, she’s a safe distance away from you and she’s pretty polite. So she won’t say anything or do anything to negate my new, clean lyrics label that iTunes decided to give me earlier last week. So yes, I am officially family friendly. So I don’t know if that reduces your writer’s credit that you’re essentially listening to a G rated show, but hopefully you’re not here for the swears.

If you are here for the swears, you’re going to be disappointed. If you are here to learn a little bit about what a writer’s group can do for you or how to start a writer’s group or the do’s and don’ts of being in a writers group, et cetera, et cetera, then you have come to the right podcast. Today, we are talking about writers groups, and I love to give credit where credit is due.

I received an email from podcast listener Laura, who initially suggested this topic to me in an email that she wrote. So I want to share the email with you and then we will get to talking about today’s topic. Laura says, “Hi, Sara, I’m a huge fan of yours and I’ve listened to every one of your podcasts at least twice. About a year ago, I took a short story writing class as a challenge to myself.

I’m 53 years old, and I haven’t explored creative writing since I was in college over 30 years ago. I pleasantly surprised myself and at the same time met an eclectic and interesting group of very supportive people whose paths I would have never crossed, were it not for writing. Meanwhile, we want to keep meeting and I wondered if you would consider doing a podcast on good practices for a writing group.

Do you have any suggestions based on your experience, exercises and activities resources, pitfalls to avoid? All the best for 2016. Laura.” Laura, thank you so much for your wonderful email. Wow, I’m just so moved whenever people get in touch with me. It’s this magic thing that happens. So thank you for being part of that magic. I hope that doesn’t sound too cheesy, but I really do mean it.

Even more than that, thank you for suggesting such a great topic for today’s episode. If you have any ideas for topics for the Write Now podcast, or if you just like to get in touch with me, you can do so just by shooting me an email at hello@sarahwerner.com, that’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com or you can go to my website, navigate over to the contact page and fill out the handy little forum that’s right there.

Lots of ways to get in touch with me. You can also just send me a tweet on Twitter if you want. My handle is SarahRheaWerner. That’s S-A-R-A-H-R-H-E-A-W-E-R-N-E-R, all one word. I would love to hear from you. Back to Laura’s question. I thought about it for a long time, how to talk about writers groups. Should I encourage people to join one, to start one, to improve one that they’re in? That’s not currently super great, and eventually, I just realized that I should just do a smorgasbord, if you will.

So I live in South Dakota. Some of you know this. Some of you might be shocked by this, because let’s face it, none of us ever really thinks that we’re going to end up in South Dakota I think unless you’re from here, but I ended up in South Dakota, and a regional saying around here is soup to nuts. I’ve lived in South Dakota since 2007, and I still don’t understand what this means.

I don’t understand it at all, but it’s used if you’re just getting the entirety of something. So hey, we’re going to build this website for you soup to nuts, and I found myself saying it without even knowing where it comes from. I don’t know why soup and nuts would be included in the same meal together. Unless you’re starting a five course dinner with soup and ending with nuts.

I don’t know. If you know where the saying comes from, send me an email or tweet me or what have you. I’m at a loss. Anyway, so I’m going to cover writers groups today, soup to nuts with a little bit of everything. I’m not going to start maybe where you think I’m going to start. Where I’m going to start is by telling you that for most of my writing life, I have been pretty much fundamentally alone.

Maybe you have too. It’s not like when you’re in high school, and all the cool kids are getting together after a football game on Friday night. They’re like, oh, let’s go do some writing together. That’s not really a thing that happens, or at least it didn’t when I was in high school. Maybe things have changed, but writing was always something that I turned to when I was feeling my most alone. When I was feeling hopeless, or abandoned or forgotten, or invisible, writing was really the tool that I reached out to to sort of prove that I still existed.

Whether it was journaling, or writing creative nonfiction, or writing fiction, and building up a new world in which it was impossible to be alone. Whatever it was. When I wrote, I sat down in the basement because I shared my room with two sisters, both of whom I love completely, but I would shut myself in the dark and creepy basement and write. I did this pretty much throughout my entire writing life.

I started writing, as most writers do, I think when I was very young, and I continued through school, high school, through college. Finally, in my senior year of college, I took a senior level creative writing course and what really got me was that it was taught by Walter Wangerin, Jr, a writer whom I greatly admired.

He had won the National Book Award in 1978 for his speculative fiction novel, The Book of the Dun Cow and I was just over the moon at the chance to kind of work in a very small group with him. The class only took seven or eight members and you had to apply to get in and I applied and I got in, and it was my first real taste of what a writer’s group could be.

I had a lot of firsts with this group as a writer. It was really the first time that I read anything that I had written out loud, which is terrifying. You get over it, but initially, it was difficult for me. It was also where I learned the value of peer critiquing. Now I’m going to tell you something that’s going to make me sound like an enormous snob. So just bear with me, and don’t judge me too harshly.

In school, whenever we had to work in groups to get a group project on, I always get super angry and frustrated because I would do all of the work. You’re judging me already. I was that person. I was that weird, nerdy girl who just took on the entire project and did the whole thing and everybody else was like, cool. I’ll just let her take care of this. I was a control freak and a perfectionist and I realized that now.

So I’m saying is all to tell you that I’d never really had a positive group experience. So part of me was really looking forward to this seminar because I would be working with Walter Wangerin Jr. Part of me was dreading it because I heard the word like collaboration and I was like, I’m going to be doing Doing everything and it’s going to suck, but as is probably to be expected from a higher level class, I learned a lot.

I learned a lot about writing. I learned a lot about words and how they work together and how stories are structured, but I also learned a lot about the power of a community. Not just that, but the power of a community of writers. There’s nothing quite like being surrounded by a group of like minded people. I’m not saying that to be creepily homogenous.

I’m not saying you need to surround yourself with people exactly like you, but when you’re surrounded by people who get excited about the same things that you do, no matter who they are, how old they are, where they come from, where they live, it is magic. It’s electric. I love talking about writing with people, perhaps it is unsurprising that I’ve started this podcast.

Maybe it was kind of inevitable. So I had this great experience in college with this class. After college, I graduated and I moved to Chicago, and I lived in the Ukrainian village. If you’ve been Chicago, I don’t know if you know where that is or not, and I decided that I wanted to feel that magic again. I was working in a job that I’ve talked about this before, that was not the best fit for me.

By which I mean it was of the sit in your cubicle and we’ll just slowly drain your soul away type of work, and I was like, I want the magic back. I want to start a writers Group here in Chicago. There’s so many creative people all around me. It’s going to be super easy. I’ll have like hundreds of people in my writers group and it’s going to be awesome.

So how it worked was several of the people who had been in my writing seminar had also moved to Chicago, different neighborhoods, but still the same city because the college we attended was reasonably close and it was a smart place to move to after college, looking for jobs. So I invited them to come to my writers group, and I invited I think eight or nine people figuring that six or seven would probably come. I had this huge long email that I sent out to invite people with.

I remember, I remember typing this email and I remember typing this email because I went through a long time when I had no internet connection in my apartment in Chicago. So I would work from a hookah lounge across the street. I drank so much Turkish coffee, it was incredible I remember drinking a Turkish coffee writing this email and just envisioning how wonderful and successful my writers group was going to be.

So the first time that we met, I had three or four people and I was like, okay, this is cool. I’ll probably get more next time. We met I think twice a month. So every other week, we would meet except when we didn’t, expect when it was just me who showed up, or except when it was me who canceled because I was so exhausted after a long and terrible day at the office, and pretty soon, it just sort of faded away.

I said earlier that I learned a lot in that senior level writing colloquium seminar class that I took. I also learned a lot from running a failed writers group in downtown Chicago. Now since then, I’ve moved to South Dakota, where I’ve met a lot of really cool, creative people.

That’s one of the things that I’ve learned since I moved to South Dakota, is that there are awesome creative people everywhere, no matter where you live. You don’t have to go to a big city like Chicago or New York to find creative people. They are everywhere, and you can attest to that. Wherever you are, you are creative, and there are people like you where you are.

So I moved to South Dakota, and I was like, you know what, I’m going to give this one more shot, but I’m going to do that implementing the lessons that I’ve learned, and it’s been very successful. So I want to share with you what has made it successful for me, and what might make it successful for you and some of the decisions that you might have to make if you’re starting a writers group and some of the benefits that you might glean if you are part of a writers group, and hopefully some part of this will speak to you.

I want to start out by talking about the different types of writers groups, because not all writers groups are the same. The first thing I want to call out is that often a writers group will be centered around a theme or type of writer, and what I mean by that is, there might be a writer’s group for only women.

There are also writers groups for science fiction lovers and writers groups for veterans with PTSD and writers groups for the elderly and writers groups for teenagers, and pretty much whoever you are, wherever you are, I hope there’s a writers group that you can join. There’s also writers groups that focus on the type of writing. So there’s groups for poets. There’s groups for fiction writers, there’s groups for novel writers. There’s groups for journalists and groups for creative nonfiction writers.

There’s even writers groups for graduate students who may be writing dissertations, nonfiction writers and mastermind groups for people who are writing for a more business oriented audience. There are also writers groups that are just umbrella. So hey, do you like to write? I don’t care if it’s a mystery or a poem, or a dissertation about epigenetics. Whatever it is, come join us, and there’s pros and cons to that.

I’ve seen writers groups where all types of writing are accepted, and some people will be uncomfortable talking about genres they don’t know a whole lot about. So I’ve seen fiction writers, prose writers who are very uncomfortable talking about poetry with a poet or someone who’s working on a doctoral thesis talking to a mystery writer. At the same time, you can have some really great conversations and some really great dialogue just about the love and power of writing.

There’s also a spectrum that I would encourage you to consider, and that spectrum goes from encouraging to critiquing, and a writers group can fall anywhere along this spectrum. The class that I took in college was about 75% critiquing and 25% encouraging. So yes, you can do this, but here’s a deadline, and you’re going to read it in front of the class at this time, and we’re going to pick it apart and not pick it apart in a bad way.

There is a difference between critique and criticism. I know people say constructive criticism, really criticism is kind of negative and what we’re talking about is maybe more critique, where you kind of isolate the objective components of a piece of writing and discuss them instead of saying I didn’t like this character, she’s boring. So there’s a difference there.

A critique would say, I’ve noticed that this character could be a little bit more active. Here’s some great ways that you can do that. In chapter three, she can do this, et cetera. So there’s a spectrum of encouraging to critiquing and one’s not negative and one’s not positive. They’re just different ways to talk about writing and they’ll provide different benefits to your group members.

So maybe you’re part of a writers group already. Maybe it’s more critiquing. Maybe it’s like the one that I’m running right now. So I have this women’s writer’s group downtown here in South Dakota and really what it is, is we get together at a local bar, and we have a little quiet area that we go to and we get our drinks and we go on ladies night where everything’s half price, which I know is not fair to dudes.

We actually found a bar where everybody’s drinks are half price, even though it’s ladies night, like everybody just gets half priced drinks, which I think is really fair and great. Sorry, off topic. Really what we do is sit down and talk about how much we love to write and it’s less of a critique. So we don’t pass around our latest work and have someone stand up and read 10 pages or read for 10 minutes from their work, and then discuss it in critique it.

What we do is we sit down, I read an inspiring passage or a poem or a quotes, and that leads into the theme of the evening. So a lot of our sessions have had a theme. So tonight we’re talking about truth, or tonight we’re talking about the power of imagery, not unlike this podcast. So we talk about the basics, the fundamentals of writing. I have all sorts of different people. I have bloggers, I have a poet. I have a children’s book writer and illustrator, I write novels. I have a journalist who comes.

So we just have this great group of women from all different sorts of writing backgrounds, and we just talk about writing and books and we drink and it’s fun. It’s social and it really lets us all interact with each other and form a very strong community. So there’s kind of that encouraging side. I’d say that ours is probably 90% encouraging, 10% critique, if that. I don’t have an ideal mix.

I’ve been part of both. I’ve been part of one that is the majority critique, and one that is the majority of encouragement, and it’s really, whatever you want to get out of it. There are benefits to both. I saw that when I was in the class in college, my writing improved because I was receiving feedback, meaningful, smart feedback from creative, smart, wonderful people, and a professor that I deeply admired.

With my current encouragement centered writing group, I find that I’m more excited about writing. I’m more inspired. I go home and I say, yeah, I love writing. I love reading, oh, this is great. It keeps me interested and fueled and enthused to write throughout the week, especially when I’m struggling with that work life and writing balance. So there’s the type of writer, there’s the type of group whether it’s encouraging or more critquey and then there’s the group itself.

How big is an ideal writers group? For me, that number is probably somewhere between four and eight people. Now I say that with the full knowledge that my current writers group has something like 20 people, and we usually get between 12 and 15 on a given evening when we meet, but I really think that for a number of purposes, if you are going to be a little bit less than, the yay hooray writing encouraging side and more on the, hey, let’s set goals and critique each other’s work, four to eight is a really sweet spot for that.

There’s also the group dynamic to consider. People are people and people are different. I’m sure you have experience with this, but sometimes you have two friends. You know one friend, you know the other friend, they don’t know each other, they meet and they hate each other. Even though both of them are friends with you, they cannot get along.

I don’t want to say be selective if you’re starting your own writers group because I don’t necessarily want to exclude people but do be careful when you’re selecting people to be in your group. Give it some thought, give it some consideration, think about how the personalities will mesh. Because really, at the end of the day, what you’re doing is creating a circle of trust. Writing, creative writing, any type of writing is deeply personal.

You put something of yourself into your writing, whether you do it by hand on a computer, whether you’re doing poetry, creative nonfiction, mystery writing, technical writing, you put yourself into those words and it can be hard. If you’re not used to doing it, it can be hard to share your writing with other people. It’s good to acknowledge that and it’s good to acknowledge that even if you’re comfortable with it, other people in your group might not be.

So you’re really aiming to create not necessarily a safe space because you do want to challenge them to learn and grow, but you’re creating a trusting space, a space where people can trust each other and not feel criticized or judged. They can feel critiqued, that’s good, criticized, less good. So in addition to the group dynamic and the type of group, if you are starting a writers group, one other piece of advice I can give you is to watch out for something that Jeff Goins calls entrepreneur depression.

I love that phrase and here’s why. Jeff Goins is a cool dude. He’s a blogger. He’s a best selling author, he’s a podcast, he kind of does everything. I love his blog, and I was reading a tip that he had for starting a writers group and he said, watch out for entrepreneur’s depression. I was like, what? I’m not a business owner. I don’t know what that means.

Essentially, it was something that I had already experienced and it was based on setting unrealistic expectations. If you’re looking to start a writers group, you’re going to have a vision and your vision is going to be exciting and you’re going to be like me and say, oh, here I am in downtown Chicago. There’s tons of creative people here. I’m going to have hundreds of people at my writers group, it’s going to be amazing.

Then in reality, when it starts, you have one or two people, and then you have no people and then maybe have one person who shows up, and it’s really discouraging. It’s normal for not a ton of people to show up to your first meeting, your second meeting, your sixth meeting. It’s not uncommon. It’s also not uncommon to feel hurt or betrayed, that no one is showing up for this amazing thing that you’ve planned and put so much work and thought into.

The best advice I can give you and the best advice that Jeff Goins can give you is to keep showing up. Keep at it, keep inviting people, keep encouraging people. Keep looking for people who are perhaps a better fit. Hand pick people who you know are looking for a writers group like yours, invite people who need help, and who want help. Think about why you’re doing this.

Are you doing it to be admired? Are you doing it to be seen as a pillar in your community? Are you doing it because you genuinely love to talk about writing and because you genuinely want to help people become better writers? I also want to bring up something that may seem obvious or weird or as a podcaster, downright hypocritical.

That is, even if and especially if you are the person leading or guiding or mentoring or moderating, whatever you want to call it, if you’re the person in charge of the group, it is especially important that you listen. I know that it seems like you might feel like a teacher and say, oh, I have all of this wisdom and knowledge, but really the most valuable thing you can do for the members of your writing group is to listen.

If you’re in the type of writers group that has people share 10 minutes or 10 pages of their work for a critique, the best thing you can do is listen. If you’re in an encouraging group like mine, where people are eager and excited to share their love of writing, the best thing you can do is to listen. I say this for a couple of reasons.

Number one, perhaps again, very obviously, listening is a great way to learn. It’s very easy to go into a group, maybe if you don’t know everyone and it’s very easy to look around and say, oh, who are these people? It’s very easy to judge, but I encourage you to give people the benefit of the doubt and sit back or sit forward, that’s even better, and listen to what they have to say.

Reserve your judgment, listen, and then provide thoughtful responses every once in a while. I’ve been in groups where the leader I think, feels like they’re teaching a class and they have to just keep talking, keep talking and filling the space. I understand that urge, but I think you’ll find a richness and a community that arises if you’re willing to listen, and if you encourage everyone in your group to do the same.

The second reason, I also firmly believe that listening is the best way to help people. Listening is one of the best and most profound gifts you can give to someone else, especially to a writer, to an introvert, to somebody who feels fundamentally alone. If you are willing to listen to somebody else, and I’m not saying just humoring them or nodding along and just waiting until you can say the next thing.

I mean, really listening to them, making eye contact, processing what they’re saying, taking in their story, processing it empathetically. I think that’s the best gift you can give somebody. What are we longing for as humans? Is to be known, to be understood, and if you can give that to somebody, if you can listen to them so that you can know them and understand them, I think that’s where a lot of the power of community starts.

Speaking of the power of community, I want to talk about the benefits of belonging to a writer’s group, because there are many. Despite this image of the writer that you always see as this lonesome figure with glasses and a cup of coffee, or a glass of wine, sitting alone in a rickety attic, maybe in a lighthouse or a tower somewhere, I think that writing can be deeply communal.

Open up any book, any book near you, fiction, nonfiction, and I’ll bet that somewhere in those beginning pages, or near the end of the work, there will be a page or two or three of thank yous, where the author thanks to their editor, their friends, family, their writers group, a number of people and they often say, I couldn’t have done this without this group of people.

This community, that has shown me love and support that has listened to me. It’s a powerful thing, and it’s not something that we easily or immediately assume associate with writing. So the first benefit of a writer’s group is community. Being around other writers, talking about writing with other writers, you start to get some of that magic back. Some of that magic that maybe you felt in college in your writing classes.

Along with that community come support, and that support can be implicit or explicit, whether it’s just knowing that you get together with your group and you’re going to feel like a writer and you’re going to feel encouraged and inspired to write or whether it’s actually needing people around to support you, or maybe even support you financially, or in other ways. That group is there for you.

They’re there to support you. You get a rejection letter, get together with your writing group, talk about it. You also have the element of accountability. I’ve talked about accountability before in earlier episodes. I want to say I have an episode about goal setting and I have another episode about what it means to have a writing mentor.

I talk about accountability in those and I want to talk about it again, it’s important. Being in a writers group means that you are going to be held accountable. In my writers group, even though it is largely encouraging, one of the things that I do at the beginning or end of each session is to have people report on their goals, and set a new goal for the upcoming session and we meet once a month.

So it’s whatever you think that you can complete within a month. So hey, by the next time we meet, I’m going to have another chapter edited, or by the next time we meet, I’m going to have 7,000 new words for you. It’s just a really great checkpoint. Every month we get together, and I have to fess up and I say yes, I completed my 7,000 words, or no, I didn’t end in the month in between each session, I can think about my group.

I can say all right, I’m accountable to this group. I set this goal, I got to go through with it, I got to write, I got to finish it. My group goes pretty easy on me, there’s no real consequences for not meeting your goals, but depending on the kind of group that you have, there can be. Another benefit of a writers group is getting help and great ideas.

I got this a little bit more when I was in the critique focused group. Someone would read for about 10 minutes or 10 pages at the beginning of each session, and then we would go around and give impressions and thoughts and ideas. If we were having problems, we could say that as well. So I would read my 10 pages and say, I’m really struggling with what to put next. There would just be this wonderful plethora of suggestions and answers, some good and some bad, but it was still really inspiring to know that the possibilities had not run dry.

There’s always another step to take, and whether you think of it yourself or if somebody else nudges you along, it’s a really lovely thing. When you’re doing critiques, you might get some folks who say, oh, you misplaced a comma, or I really think that there should be a period here. Then you’ll get people who say, are you sure this is in line with this character’s motivations, or this short story really might work better as a poem.

There’s just this incredible flow of ideas that can meet you in a writers group. I encourage you to keep an open mind and know that other people are interested and eager and trying to help. It also helps to have established, in the beginning of your writers group, the difference between criticism and critique, and to agree on how aggressive criticisms and critiques should be.

Some people love having super critical or super criticismical, that’s not a word, but you know what I mean. They like those really aggressive groups where like, no, you need to do this, you need to do this. A lot of people thrive and grow in that and for me, I take my writing so personally, that I just really need someone to gently be like, you know Sarah, this is good, but it might be better if he went this direction.

So depending on what you need and what you prefer, I hope that your group can provide that to you. Kind of along those lines, a writers group can be a really wonderful zone of trust. I mentioned earlier the word trust and not safety because sometimes you do want to be challenged and sometimes being challenged does not feel incredibly safe, but you do want to be with a group of people whom you can trust.

People who you know will give good advice, people whom you can feel comfortable or learn to feel comfortable reading your work in front of. Again, that’s kind why I mentioned the four to eight number of people in your group. Because smaller than that, if it’s just one on one could maybe be a little awkward. Larger than that, I think the more people you get, the more difficult it is to have that sort of intimate community and implicit trust. If you have 20 people around a table, it’s really hard to trust that many people or maybe I’m just paranoid.

I can only trust a very select small number of people, I don’t know. Make sure that you feel comfortable and welcome and invited in your writers group and that you feel like you can trust the people around you. If you can’t, it might be time to look for a new writers group or to consider starting your own. A writers group can be a great place to improve your skills, whether it’s through critique or whether it’s just simply through being in community with other writers and talking the talk and walking the walk.

You can get insights and perspectives that you can’t really get on your own. I know that everything that I’ve learned about writing, I’ve either learned from reading or I’ve learned from someone else explaining things to me, things that I didn’t even know that I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have known what a query letter was if someone who had already been published had not explained it to me.

You don’t know what you don’t know. So sometimes a strong community can help fill in the gaps. Finally, a writers groups should be fun. Now, I’m not saying you have to go to each one and just be like whoa, party, because you might be getting some serious work done or having some serious conversations and important conversations.

Despite the critiques, despite the hard work, despite the nerves and anxiety of sharing your writing with other people, you should feel good about your writers group. You should look forward to it. It should be a source of good creative energy for you. So I guess this benefit is that the writers group should benefit you.

Laura, in your email, you asked for suggestions, exercises, activities, resources, pitfalls. I think I’ve covered most of what I wanted to say about those. As far as exercises and activities, every once in a while for my writers group, I will bring a writing prompt and encourage everyone to bring a pen and paper and we’ll write about something that’s related to the theme that we’re going to talk about that day.

So, sense words. We’ll have a little writing exercise and then talk about how we convey the five senses within our writing, et cetera, et cetera. Sometimes it can be helpful to write while you’re at writers group, other writing groups, not so much. Activities could include critiques as we’ve been talking about, reading of your material, discussing a book or a passage from a book, drinking, whether that be coffee, or sodas or adult beverages of some kind.

My writers group in Chicago we drink coffee. My writers group here in South Dakota, we drink wine and cocktails. So whatever is age appropriate and time of day appropriates, and audience appropriate for your group. As far as pitfalls to avoid, I think I’ve kind of covered those as well. A group that’s too large, a group that’s too small, a group with a negative dynamic, a group that criticizes instead of critiques, a group where everyone is talking over each other instead of listening, a group whose leader gives into entrepreneur’s depression, and gives up when the outcome is not as amazing as they had hoped it would be.

One last note about writers groups. So I started my writers group here in South Dakota. I started it, I want to say exactly one year ago and I remember at that very, very first meeting, telling my group that I wanted to start maybe a blog, or maybe really take off with this idea that I had for a podcast. I can correlate exactly, and I think justify the cause of this podcast as being at least in part, inspired by and encouraged by my writing group.

Another member of my writers group had a very similar experience, and actually, I’ve interviewed her for this podcast before. One of my earlier Coffee Break episodes was an interview with a blogger named Mad like Alyce, and that’s Alyce with a Y and you can go back into my podcast archives and listen to our conversation.

She also at the very beginning of this writers group said that she wanted to start a blog, and that was what she did. So pretty much exactly one year ago, she started a blog. She now has, I believe, a very healthy followership. She’s been guest blogging, she’s been doing all sorts of really cool things, her traffic has increased.

She and I were talking the other day, and we’re both like, wow, these significant projects that we started, we both started them within the bounds of this writers group and they’ve really turned out well, and we’re still excited about them and working on them and it’s just been a really great ride. I think we both attributed at least some of our success and follow through to joining this writers group.

So if you have any experience belonging to or starting or quitting a writers group, I would love to hear from you. You can comment in the show notes for today’s episode by going to my website, sarahwerner.comAnd going to podcast and blog and finding this podcast episode listed there, scrolling down to the bottom and leaving a comment. You can also email me as I mentioned before at hello@sarahwerner.com, that’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com, and letting me know there.

I do love reading the emails that I receive over the air. It’s really fun and I just love to share everyone’s unique voice. So I will share your voice. Just let me know. I’m not going to do a book of the week this week because I made the mistake, well, it’s not a mistake. I made the awesome choice of starting a very, very large science fantasy epic, and it’s called Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey, and I am loving it so far. I love science fiction, but it is super big.

It is incredibly lengthy. So I’m only about maybe a third of the way through and so I can tell you that it’s really fun so far, it’s really good. It’s a little dark. It’s a little creepy, but it’s completely enthralling. So I’m really enjoying it. I just can’t give you a full talk about it yet because I want to finish it before I do that.

So I’m reading a book, I want to have it done by my next podcast episode, but I might not, but I will provide you with updates on where I am. You can follow me on Goodreads. Goodreads is a website where, it’s kind of like social media but without all of the annoying updates I guess. I go in there, I keep track of everything and I’m reading, everything that I’ve read. I’ll let you know what page I’m on of what book.

Goodreads.com. G-O-O-D-R-E-A-D-S.com, you can find me. I’m user Sara Rhea Werner, same as my Twitter handle. I also will link to it in the show notes for today’s episode. Couple other things. I love podcasting. I love doing this. I love it when people reach out to me. I love knowing that I am hopefully reaching out and providing value to you, value and inspiration and encouragement to write every day.

I know that I’ve mentioned in previous podcasts episodes that if you want to give back, you can become a Patreon supporter or go to my website and navigate to the tip jar where you can leave, it’s like $1 in a baristas jar. You can leave a buck or two in appreciation, but I really hate asking for that. I’m really uncomfortable asking for that. I don’t know if it’s because I hate asking for help or if I just feel like a tool.

I’m bad at it, and I do, I feel like a tool when I ask for help. So the tip jar is still there if you want to give a gift or what have you, but I haven’t told anyone else this yet. So you’re the first to hear this but I’m going to be opening up a store, a podcast merge store where I will be selling merchandise or merch, as I’ve been calling it. It’s slow going, I’m still building it, but there will be various items available.

Currently I have a stack of magnets and mugs and I ordered a couple hoodies. If there is anything in particular that you would like, tote bags for all of your books, what have you, let me know. Get a hold of me on Twitter or on the Write Now podcast Facebook group or send me an email. Let me know what you would be interested in and I’m hoping to have that set up within the next month or so.

I will, again, still have the other donation platforms available Patreon and paypal.me, but I just wanted to have, I don’t know, a store available as well. Gosh, I get so uncomfortable talking about this stuff. I could never be a business owner and have to sell things. I’d be so awful. I’d be like here, let me give you this for free and also here’s a hug.

Speaking of Patreon, I have wonderful supporters to thank. my Patreon supporters help me to cover hosting costs and a ton of other costs that are associated with podcasting. Turns out this is, you can do it relatively inexpensively but there is still expense to doing a podcast.

So I just want to shout out to my Patreon supporters, including official cool cat Sean Locke, official rad dude, Andrew Coons and official bookworm, Rebecca Werner. You have done so much to help keep this podcast going. I am so grateful that you’ve decided to help support my work. Thank you.

If you want to help support the Write Now podcast in a non financial way, that is also really awesome. I encourage you to share episodes of the Write Now podcast with friends, family members, other writers that you know, anyone whom you think would benefit from some creative encouragement.

You can also subscribe to my podcast on whatever pod catcher app it is that you prefer. Whether it’s iTunes, Stitcher, Podcatcher Deluxe, Acast, Overcast, whatever it is you use. It all does help me to reach larger audiences and to find new people who I can help inspire. Most of all, I want to thank you for listening. I want to thank you for just being awesome and for sharing this time of your day with me to be in community around the topic of writing.

I love it. You’re the reason I’m doing this. I hope you know that. I hope you know that you are important and you matter and that the things that you are writing, or the things that you are going to write matter. I know that writing can be a really lonely practice and it’s easy to feel alone, but you’re not.

Whether you can find a writers group near you or not, please know that when you are listening to this podcast, you are part of a group of writers, a community where you belong, and you matter, and you are appreciated for who you are, just the way you are. With that, this has been Episode 35 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m Sarah Werner, and I just think you’re amazing.