Announcing Side-by-Side Writing Sessions on Thursday Nights

For so many of us, an entire day flies by without a single minute to devote to our writing. Before we realize it, a whole week has passed and we haven’t made any progress on our works-in-progress.

On the flip side, some writers spend so much time working that they never leave the house, never have the benefit of even limited social interaction with a community of other writers.

To address both of these issues, the NRAS Writers Workshop is happy to announce the introduction of Side-by-Side Writing on Thursday nights at the G.A.R. Hall. Starting on April 8, members of the Writers Workshop are invited to gather DOWNSTAIRS at the G.A.R. Hall, from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m., every Thursday, for two hours of dedicated writing time among their peers.

These weekly Side-by-Side Writing sessions will be very different from our monthly Writers Workshops. You just come in, grab a seat at a table, and start writing; work on whatever project you’d like to work on in a quiet but energizing setting. At the beginning and end of the evening, we can set aside a few minutes to chat briefly and exchange work, if desired. It’s not designed to be a workshop or critique session, but it might be a good opportunity to reach out to other writers and make arrangements to meet off-site, or share work via e-mail, etc.

It’s a drop-in, no-commitment format: You don’t have to come every week…but you can come every week if you’d like to. We’ll make room at the tables!

Please bring your own writing materials: notebooks, journals, laptops with FULLY CHARGED batteries.

NOTE: To access the hall’s downstairs, please enter through the SIDE DOOR, on the left side of the building, so that we don’t disturb the art class that’s in session upstairs at that time.

So please mark your calendars: THESE WEEKLY SESSIONS BEGIN ON APRIL 8.

Guest Blog Post by Lisa Vallier

I think we should have a contest—we writers—to see how many times we can move a word around.

I’m pretty sure I’ll win. Take that.

No, really, take the word ‘that.’ I think I’ve written it and deleted it a thousand times, and that was just in the last hour.

See how I snuck that in there? Whoops, again.

Which brings up another pet peeve of mine: Snuck.

“Snuck is a word,” my less literary friends argue.

“But it’s not correct,” I say.

“But it doesn’t matter,” they say. “Everyone uses it.”

Which begs the question: do we write what we speak or do we write by the rules? My answer is we write what we want to write whether it’s high brow or low, whether it appeals to the masses or minuses.

Anything that takes me out of the box (the box being my cubicle) and into a story where I forget there’s an author or my children begging for a snack in the next room—that’s the story for me.

We all have a list of our personal overused words and we all have one, or many, stories to write.

Now it’s just a matter of finding the errant words that may have snuck into your story and replacing them with some descriptive, interesting, unique but not too hard to pronounce ones.

That and finding a damn agent.

I'd Like to Thank the Academy

I wasn't (really) watching the Oscars last night. I was trying to make some progress on compiling my new list of agents to query.

But I did happen to catch screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher accepting his Academy Award for the adapted screenplay of "Precious," and his words really struck me.

He said: "This is for everybody who works on a dream every day."

And I thought: Yeah, that's exactly what we're doing, as writers. We're plugging away at novels, short stories, poems, children's books, memoirs, scripts, etc., because we feel that we have something important to say, something worthwhile to share.

And we're very lucky to be able to work on a dream every day, to work toward that dream, and to get that much closer to it every day.

Now get back to it! :)