It
feels increasingly trivial to talk about writing things these days. But
if you’re feeling decidedly ‘whelmed’ by everything else on your
Facebook feed, this might be useful to you.
Last year, I decided
that it was dumb to live in a metroplex of 7 million people, which
probably has about 6 million writers groups, when none of said groups
even knew the others existed. We were all just hunkered down in our
little bunkers, doing our own thing. To be clear: there is nothing wrong
with choosing that, but it isn’t a choice if you have no alternative –
if you don’t know even know whether you HAVE neighbors, let alone who or
where they are.
So I started visiting every writers group I could find, and at each one I asked: what others do you know of? Who else is out there?
Turns out the answer is, "a whole hell of a lot."
So we made our own little group-of-groups - it's called
WORD (Writers Organizations 'Round Dallas).
And by and by, we got some momentum going. We started having monthly
meetups where representatives from different groups would all get
together and trade event flyers, share news, and problem-solve together.
(“How do you prevent brain-drain when your best writers get published
and then leave the group?” “What do you do when your critique group gets
too big for a single discussion circle?” “Does anybody know a speaker
who can come talk to us about Scrivener?”)
Now, a little less
than a year later, there are twenty-three groups on the map, and we’re
still finding more. We’ve got our first-ever writers group “trade fair”
happening next month, which I will wax ecstatic about tomorrow and for
weeks to come. Thanks to the visionary
Kathryn McClatchy,
we’re even getting plans in place to pool our resources and have a
big-name author come talk to us later this year (all the way from
Australia!) Our new network is still a little speck in the grand scheme
of things, but I’m really happy with where it’s going – and I think that
if we work hard and play our cards right, we can help make DFW as much
of a literary hotspot as LA or Seattle or Minneapolis.
All of
which is to say:
if you are feeling adrift in this age of millions –
millions of marchers, voters, viewers, buyers, and sharers –
I really,
really recommend finding yourself a real-life mission of dozens. A dozen
neighbors is a neighborhood. A dozen students is a class. A dozen
relatives is a family. Our brains are wired to interact with and enjoy
people in those quantities, in a way that we can’t manage with our 900
Facebook friends. I can make no meaningful difference to a million
writers – but twenty-three of us are doing something valuable here in
our little corner of the world.
And I suspect that you are
*perfectly* positioned – in where you live, what you love, and who you
know – to do something right now that no other person reading this could
accomplish. Don’t discount that. The smallest, most intense and
personal jobs are the hardest to assign, the work of the most priceless
people (and if you don’t believe that, when was the last time you got a
new mom?)
Your feed is constantly handing you the work of a
nation, of a whole society, and that IS important – but please don’t let
that be a reason to neglect the work of your own neighborhood. The
tasks we assign ourselves are by definition the essential work that
nobody else is stepping up to do – and in that, you are irreplaceable.
