Night and Days of the Long Knives (and the Short Knives too) in Plymouth creative writing

Writers Groups should be treated with caution. That is my headline statement. The majority of people in the room will not want to hear your work, only their own. The chances are they will also be members of other writers groups who are likely to be competitive for many reasons. The first is publicity. The majority of people write for pleasure. The step on the first rung of the ladder with a writers group will be reading your work out to a bunch of strangers who will all have very different opinions on your work to you. If you are reading an extract from a Science Fiction draft you can bet your bottom quid the romantic novelist in the room will switch off. You can also bet the poet sat across the table, will be incandescent with rage that you have brought Star Trek-ish Klingon claptrap into their precious creative time. Then there are the 'Lady Bountifuls'. The mature women who float from writers group, to poetry group, to play group to U3A group; ambitious in their retirement years to 'be somebody' and criticise your work perhaps a little to over-enthusiastically. They will also, like a delicate gold Lady Sheaffer pen being dropped on the soft Axminster carpet, launch in quickly a tout for their writers group as a form of advertising the building they hold it in and how well its doing. That means it isn't. That means its probably linked to a charity balancing a precarious financial act of hanging on by the threads of its threadbare Marksies pants and is desperate for new members to bolster the books. (Not the literature books .... the accountants). Watch out for these Lady Bountifuls. They migrate as chiffon ectoplasms about the creative community eagerly promoting their work in the background while being totally dismissive of yours. They are the smiling assassins of the writers group in any community. And of course there are the weirdo journalists. Those Hacks who rub by for a few quid on the local rag (I mean newspaper) and develop a personaility complex about not being recognised as journalists. If they were that good they would have elevated up from journalism decades ago and be running a publishing house somewhere. Such Hacks get hacked off if creative writers don't go down on bended knee in libation to them or their newspaper, begging for a line or two in the local rag. Grovel, grovel. It becomes far worse when they become addicted to Open Mic events where they sit in the front row with furrowed brow, cheap Bic pen in hand and dog-eared notepaper at the ready to 'score' the speaker about their work. You may have won a national competition first prize on your poem but if you aren't amenable to what they want, you will be erased from the entire evening and never see light of day in their local rag. So don't join a writers group where a local journalist circles like a scrawny shark. They are in it for themselves. They have an ego as big as the sky. Take all writers groups lightly. Because there are few genuine friendships there. You may find that when you vanish to have a cancer operation or two (fact) you will never hear from any of your fellow writers. You may be under the long and the short knives of the surgeon but your writing 'friends' will be so busy burning off the next chapter they are very likely to forget your predicament (fact). They will be too busy sharpening their own knives in the dream of fame and recognition (and of course, money). Feel the footprints on your back. Tread carefully. Its a top tip. :)