Writing Clubs: Reading The Room And Entertaining Everyone

I am in three writing clubs. The first is at my school. I've been the president for two years, and before that I was secretary for two years. Another of them, thehabit.co, is an online group of dedicated young writers looking for community as they write. The third is a subset of the Habit that focuses almost entirely on publishing or aspiring to publish.

These three "clubs" are different because they contain different types of people and exist for different purposes. For the first two years that I was on the board of the Creative Writing and Illustration Club (CWIC) at my school, we were floundering. In a school of about 400 at the time, we struggled to keep attendance above 10 people. This isn't anyone's fault (especially not the former president, who I greatly respect to this day). Those ten people were dedicated, came often, participated, gave ideas, and enjoyed it. We had guest talks, did workshops with different themes, and every once in a while tried to rack up some people to participate in a writing contest. We met regularly once a month, minus weeks that fell on breaks. But the school just wasn't chock-full of writers with words dripping from the tips of their fingers.

When I became president, we decided to shift around a lot of things. We added Illustration into the name of the club and dedicated two out of the 8-10 meetings we had as "illustration weeks." And we finally read the room. We saw that our first meeting (attendance being around 15-20 in good years) was the most pivotal meeting of the year, and that the rest of the year depended on us showing them what they had come to see.

In a school of about 500-550 by then where almost every club was about games and entertainment, the extra people we had at the first meeting were coming expecting to engage the creative parts of their minds with writing-related games and activities. When they were met with a more serious group of people, we lost the ones who just wanted to have fun.

But this gave us a different problem. We had a small handful of people who were expecting exactly what we were giving - a small group of writers who wanted to talk about the struggles of writing and how to make it easier. We also had a handful of people who wanted to goof off and play games.

There isn't a lot of exception to that dynamic in large clubs, in my opinion. Even on the Habit, there are people who usually appear on the writing threads, people who make the most use of the chatty threads, and people who do both equally (and none of those things are bad, all three types of people are absolutely still writers). The third club I'm in that focuses on publishing (the Guild) is one exception. Though we still have spaces to just talk about life, most of the goofiness stays on the regular forums, and the Guild is a smaller space specifically for the people who are hoping to or ready to publish. The keyword there is smaller, because to appeal to more people, you have to have a mix of both. Some people want to have deep conversations. Some people want to brainstorm crazy stories with their friends.

So we're back to the dilemma the CWIC Board had as we started to read the room: how do you entertain everyone? Writers were our target audience, so we definitely didn't want to lose the down-to-earth aspiring authors. But the goofy middle schoolers wanted to see what writing was about, too, and if everyone has a little writer in them like I think they do, then they deserved to have a good writing community as well.

The answer lies in open-endedness. We've found that we keep the most people around by allowing our activities to easily cater to any type of writer. To make sure everyone knows that, I try to impress it upon them when I'm explaining our activities. This can work for your novel-in-the-making. This can work for a story you want to enter in a contest. This can work for you and your friends to have fun making something up that may or may not get written down. Either way, you are exercising the creative parts of your brain, and that means our mission is accomplished.

What kinds of open-ended activities? Well, sooner rather than later, I'll be posting resources for writing clubs under the resources tab you can find if you're logged in to this site. But you can make your own, too! What seems to work best is picking a topic (let's say, character development), creating some sort of worksheet (I've made one that I'll post eventually), and presenting is as moldable to your purposes. Our last CWIC meeting was on character development. I told them, "You can use this for a character you know you need in a story but don't know yet, like a villain or an MC's sibling. You can use this for a character you know but want to flesh out. You can come get a set of dice and see what you roll for the personality options. You can make up something random. Whatever you do, it's helping you become a better writer." We had four people using the worksheet for D&D characters. They asked me if that was okay, and a couple of them even apologized. I told them they absolutely did not need to be sorry. Writing is versatile; it can be and is used in every aspect of life, and whether you're writing a paper, a book, or a blog post, you are always improving.

Another good example from the CWIC, where we've always got a limited amount of time to make everyone happy, is Publishing Week. For the second year in a row, I gave a talk about the process of publishing to the club. But in planning it, we came to a roadblock: some kids just don't care. They're going to be bored, and then they won't want to come back. So we set up a drawing activity so that they could draw while listening (or draw while tuning me out). It was a complete success, everyone had fun, and it actually made kids who had never thought about publishing more intrigued in the process.

Don't hear this as, "if you don't play dumb games no one will come to your club." Don't hear it as "if you want to be a real writing club you can't be serious" or "you have to be serious." If you want to get together with a small group of dedicated people, read the room - those dedicated people most likely want to mirror the Inklings. If you want to start a larger club and attract more people, read the room - you'll probably find that you're going to have to figure out how to cater to everyone's needs, which isn't as hard as it seems. Whatever your writing club looks like, you're still in community with writers, and that's the important part.