We meet on Wednesdays. There are only women. When we laugh, sometimes we cackle and then we cover our mouths in embarrassment, or more often, delight.
I delight in these women. They are my mothers and sisters and our secret handshakes give us the inner strength to carry on doing our covert activities week after week.
What covert activities you may ask? On the surface, if you were to walk by our table in the coffee shop, you might think we were friends catching up. And we are becoming friends but the purpose of our gathering is writing. Each week we bring drafts of our memoirs-in-progress, our baby-novels and our dreams and carefully, we lay them on the table for scrutiny and encouragement.
We are the L.A.K.S. The Loving Ass-Kicking Society.
When one of us has a piece accepted/rejected, we pour on love and encouragement. When another is flagging and can't find their mojo, we gently, but firmly, tell them that in no-uncertain-terms can they STOP writing. They simply must keep going.
That inner critic all writers live with? We encourage her presence and then question her reliability aloud. Is she right on this one? Should we trust her or be brave and keep writing to find out what lurks beneath the surface? How many drafts to perfection?
In our secret (until now) society, all of us come with different worldviews that flavour our critiques of each other's work. One of us will often say, "put a finer point on this; I don't get it." Another will applaud the quirky and weird and another will always ask for "more emotion." This is on top of the technical scrutiny, such as "This sentence is ridiculously overwrought. Were you drinking when you wrote it?" or "Stop filtering. Trust the reader. You've told me too much."
The wisdom and grace from this group is the weekly antidote I need to keep writing, and re-writing. Have I started my chapter with an image or action? Is the reader the detective? Does the internal conflict come out in the relationships? My beloved Secret Society has given me guiding questions to make every word better, every character deeper and every plot point plausible.
We don't have an official manifesto, but I've come to see Anne Lamott's "Bird by Bird" and Stephen King's "On Writing" as basically sacred texts. When Lamott wrote the following, I stopped dying my hair, believing that every act of vanity was stopping me from completing my manuscript.
If you are a writer, that is, if there are people in your head, opening words to a story yet unwritten, or scenes that replay in your mind like a movie that you want to share with others then you must find space to begin writing it all down. It took me over four years from my very first writing course to my most recent; four years to find the women who also shared my fear of not getting the writing done. It took time to find women who wrote well, but also read widely. We tell the truth to one another. We love one another and when needed, we do some serious ass-kicking.
On that note, I must send a birthday shout-out to one of my most favourite L.A.K.S, the intelligent and wise soon to be bestselling, genre bending author, the one and only Cat Skinner. Happy Birthday!!