The following was not initially written as a blog post. I intended this for a book that I am writing and to be honest, I think it may still go in, too early to tell. However as I was writing it I knew I had to share it here. It’s a post I wanted to write for a while but didn’t know how to start it and as I sat working on another piece it just came out. I would love your feedback!

I facilitate a writers group and a poetry group. They are sharing groups where people come together, sip tea or coffee, eat cookies and delight in each others work.

It’s not a critique group.

I say that to new members. I say that on the site that promotes the group, I remind newcomers of it when they start talking about “being published” and “what I’ve learned.” I understand. We all want our work to be the best it can be. So we take courses, listen to others with “more success” than us. We edit, edit and edit. We change things, take out words, add words, correct grammatical mistakes. All to make it the best work.

But who’s best?

I recently got into a minor disagreement with a new member of our group who started the group by offering suggestions to improve it and despite my best efforts took out his pen to offer criticism.  We are a welcoming, gentle group who support the creative process that each and every one of us goes through. We are not there to rip someone apart to make them “better.” We do not pretend that we know more than the person sitting next to us. We share, we laugh, we cry, we support.

At one point, the new member suggested words to avoid because, “that is how you make great writing.” The statement upset me extremely because I know the creative stories of the people in our group. I know what it took for some of them to share that first poem or short story. I know what it still takes for them. To make the suggestion that because she used the word “and” that her piece was not great was incredibly insulting. While his intentions were to help this person get their work published (even though that is not her expressed intention) the phrase angered me.

Who decides what is great writing?

Critics? Gray-haired men sitting in dark stuffy libraries puffing on cigar smoke?
People who feel the need to impart their superiority and spout off the work of the “classics.”
I read the classics in school. Well, OK I read the Cliff’s Notes version of most of the classics.
I hated them. To me, they sucked. They were boring, depressing and showed life at its worst.
I also loved to read and could polish off a 350 page book in a day and usually did so just about every day.

I would say that’s the definition of well-read wouldn’t you?

What really got to me? Was it this guy, regurgitating the literary world’s “rules” (the ones I take great pride in breaking)? Was it the part of me that started an argument with my English teacher who explained that my interpretation of the book Ethan From (which I actually read in it’s entirety and loved) was wrong.
(To which I responded, “how do you know? Did you talk to the author personally?” )

While that was part of it, the truth is he triggered the part of me that knows I am not considered “well-read.” The part that knows she could never hold her own in a literary debate of the minds. The part of me that likes reading Nora Roberts as much as Emily Dickinson.  The part of me that would pour out my heart on a paper only to have it handed back with all the grammatical errors and the ever-so-present note, “too many run-on sentences.”

I write how I talk. I flood the paper with words and emotions because I am feeling so much as the fingers click the keyboard. I want to express every single feeling that wells up inside of me and not allow a moment of that emotion to go unexpressed because I pause to look up whether I need a colon or a semicolon.

I am a horrible speller. I hated diagramming sentences and still need to stop and think about what an adverb is. I am flawed. My writing is unpolished, unedited and I am unapologetic for it.

You see critics, professors, teachers and those that wish to show off are the ones who make rules about creativity.

And I don’t write for them.
I write for me. I write for the people who sit at the table next to me at a diner. I write for people who want to listen. If you can’t get passed how I dress to hear my words,

You wouldn’t understand them anyway.

Until Next Time….
Michele, aka The Dreaming Dilettante