Why join a writer's group or a writing workshop?

Nicole forwarded me this email from LAwritersgroup.com workshop moderator Kat Smith, and it felt relevant to post a piece of her message for our blog readers. If you're still on the fence about joining or participating in a writing workshop of any kind, perhaps her words will sway you:

Young musicians practice daily. A singer doesn't begin with an aria. She starts by warming up her vocal cords. A pianist practices his scales every day from a young age. An athlete doesn't begin with a triathlon. He spends hours lifting weights, stretching, building the muscle mass and flexibility that will support the feats he intends to achieve.

Writing is no different. We become writers with daily practice. Getting in touch with our unique voices. Writing fast, writing free. Progress may be so incremental as to be unnoticeable, just as a pianist doesn't go from chopsticks to Chopin. Some days you'll hate what you write. But one day, something astonishing will come pouring out of you and you'll wonder where the hell it came from.

It came from the 1,183 writing exercises that preceded it. Exercises where you trained your mind to focus, where you learned to trust your voice, to step out of your way, to let it flow. Practice writing like practicing scales, may not seem very glamorous. Bring your passion to it anyway. That's the work of an artist.

Kat also included the following video in her message. It features Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Boys, giving his take on consistent writing:

It seems as though a constant flow of writing is the best way to find your best work. Even small exercises on a consistent basis can help keep you in good practice. I myself participate in LAwritersgroup.com's writer's groups, and I completely agree with what Kat and Ray have said. Writer's groups and writing workshops provide their members the opportunity to practice their skill in an open forum with other writers just as dedicated to their craft. So I ask you this: do you practice your writing on a consistent basis? Do you think that this "fine tuning" and practicing approach can be effective?

LA Literati - Ray Bradbury

"Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."
-Ray Bradbury

Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois. His family moved to Los Angeles when he was 13 years old. He is somewhat distantly related to the American Spalding family, owners of the famous Spalding sports equipment company. His central character Douglas Spaulding, from the novel Dandelion Wine was reportedly drawn from this heritage.

Bradbury was a reader and writer throughout his youth, spending much time in the Carnegie library in Waukegan, Illinois. He used this library as a setting for much of his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, and depicted Waukegan as "Green Town" in some of his other semi-autobiographical novels — Dandelion Wine, Farewell Summer — as well as in many of his short stories.

He attributes his lifelong habit of writing every day to an incident in 1932 when a carnival entertainer, Mr. Electrico, touched him on the nose with an electrified sword, made his hair stand on end, and shouted, "Live forever!" It was from then that Bradbury wanted to live forever and decided his career as an author in order to do what he was told: live forever. It was at that age that Bradbury first started to do magic. Magic was his first great love. If he had not discovered writing, he would have become a magician. We're happy he decided to chuck the rabbit and make words appear out of a hat instead.

His website, www.Raybradbury.com contains a complete list of Bradbury's titles and some excellent video interview footage of Bradbury taken in 2001.

LA Literati - Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood was born in England.  In 1929, he moved to Germany (where he wrote, among other things, Goodbye to Berlin which was the basis for the Broadway musical and film, Cabaret).

He moved to the states in 1939 and eventually settled in Hollywood.  He met Gerald Heard, the mystic-historian who founded his own monastery at Trabuco Canyon that was eventually bequested to the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Through Heard, who was the first to discover Swami Prabhavananda and Vedanta, Isherwood joined an extraordinary band of mystic explorers that included Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Chris Wood (Heard's lifelong friend), John Yale and J. Krishnamurti. He embraced Vedanta, and, together with Swami Prabhavananda, produced several Hindu scriptural translations, Vedanta essays, the biography Ramakrishna and His Disciples, novels, plays and screenplays, all imbued with the themes and character of Vedanta and the Upanishadic quest.

A chance encounter in a Los Angeles bookstore with the fantasy writer Ray Bradbury led to a favorable review of The Martian Chronicles, which boosted Bradbury's career and helped to form a friendship between the two men.

Isherwood became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1946.  He began living with the photographer William (Bill) Caskey. In 1947 the two traveled to South America. Isherwood wrote the prose and Caskey provided the photographs for a 1949 book about their journey, The Condor and the Cows.

On Valentine's Day 1953, at the age of 48, he met teen-aged Don Bachardy among a group of friends on the beach at Santa Monica. Reports of Bachardy's age at the time vary, but Bachardy later said "at the time I was, probably, 16." Despite the age difference, this meeting began a partnership that, though interrupted by affairs and separations, continued until the end of Isherwood's life.  During the early months of their affair, Isherwood finished–and Bachardy typed–the novel he had been working on for some years, The World in the Evening (1954). Isherwood also taught a course on modern English literature at Los Angeles State College (now California State University, Los Angeles) for several years during the 1950s and early 1960s.

The more than 30-year age difference between Isherwood and Bachardy raised eyebrows at the time, with Bachardy, in his own words, "regarded as a sort of child prostitute" but the two became a well-known and well-established couple in Southern Californian society with many Hollywood friends.

Down There on a Visit, a novel published in 1962, comprised four related stories that overlap the period covered in his Berlin stories. In the opinion of many reviewers, Isherwood's finest achievement was his 1964 novel A Single Man, that depicted a day in the life of George, a middle-aged, gay Englishman who is a professor at a Los Angeles university.

Isherwood and Bachardy would live together until Isherwood's death in 1986 at the age of 81.