Young Writers Society

Okay everybody, so I'm thinking about starting a creative writing club at my school - just a group that meets once a week or so to read over poetry and stories that everyone is writing. Does anybody have this kind of thing going in their school so I could get some tips? I've got some ideas, but really I don't know what I'm doing lol.

Thanks!

~Sunny

I help run a bi-weekly writing group that meets at Barnes and Noble. And, honestly, I'm not very happy with the way it works. We have two different people reading every week, and everyone else critiques them. That's it. No prompts, no creative writing tips, nothing. So, here's what I would suggest. First off: get as many ideas involved as you can. Perhaps you can start it with some classmates and they can help contribute to the ideas. Secondly: perhaps it's an idea to, at the beginning of every meeting, have a "writing period" when a prompt is provided and everyone just writes. Afterwards, you can go around and read them, if you like, or discuss what everyone wrote. This is something I've always wanted to do for a writing group, and have never had the opportunity. And, lastly, perhaps you could have one "featured" piece every meeting, where one person reads something they've written for critiquing. If you do this, though, you might want to figure out a way to give the critiquers the piece they will be looking at ahead of time so they can read it over and give the best critique possible. And maybe every so often there could be just a workshop, where there are different prompts and different methods of inspiration and everyone just writes.

I hope I helped!!

Poetry club at my HS was, without a doubt, my happy place. We would get together once a week during lunch, and just read poetry. Usually we didn't critique, unless we were specifically asked, and that worked pretty well, actually. The older poets (and those who had been members longer) tended to be the better poets, and their readings usually helped encourage newer poets to expand their range of poetry. Constructive without the criticism, if you will. It was a much slower, though much less painful, process of having work critiqued, I think. Plus, you got to hear all sorts of fun poetry. And we had our own set of gags in the club, too. We would do group poems (one person writes one line, then another, fold over the first line, next person writes a line, folds over the top line, etc. Boy, did that get interesting).

But yeah. That was informal. From that group sprung smaller circles that would get together and actually workshop.

cool! thank you guys so much! snap, a lot of your ideas were similar to mine lol. although i did want a kind of informal feel to it as well. we'll see what happens. i plan on having an interest meeting sometime soon, so that'll help.

At my school there is both a literary magazine and a creative writing club. I'm an editor for the litmag, and I've gone to the club before. The litmag, having been around for more than half a century, is better and tends to draw people with more sophisticated writing and critiquing skills. We meet once a week and discuss submissions, which are kept anonymous. The creative writing club is similar, but it does not keep submissions anonymous (comments are directed right at the author) and comments tend to be...not as good.

It really depends on the people you have and the amount of interest there is. Getting together afterschool in a teacher's room and asking people to bring in their work is a very easy way to get a creative writing club started. If you want to expand, try writing games and maybe a "tip of the week" or "focus of the week" type thing.