Creative Habits: Positive Energy from Shared Commitment
Today’s post is brought to us from A.M. (Anne) Carley, of Anne Carley Creative.
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
I was a lonely kid a lot of the time. Because of that background, it’s perhaps even more meaningful to me in adulthood when I find myself in a group that shares and enhances my own interests. It’s a stereotype that writers are curmudgeonly loners. I’m not convinced of that. And even if writers need to isolate in order to make the time to create, I find time and again that writers also treasure a sense of community. This can show up in many ways. Following is an appreciation of two of the ways I have come to enjoy in my own creative life. Both have led me to cultivate and sustain positive writing habits. We all know how hard it can be to set up good habits, and these are two excellent means to those ends.
Writer Group
I’ve been in a writer group for more than ten years. We met because we all chose to enroll in a writing class at the local nonprofit writer center. There were more than just the four of us in that class – and each student signed up and showed up for their own reasons. The nonprofit center had been founded just a few years earlier – by writers – to create community and educate people. Those writers had found one another in this town, after moving here from across the country, each for their own constellations of reasons. So our group’s lineage hails back to many other writers’ prior intentions and actions. I appreciate so much the sense of continuity embodied in our writer group.
Our membership has morphed over the years, from four to five to six to five to four to three writers, with a couple of additional short-term guests along the way. Of the three current members, two of us were there in that class at the writing center back in 2011 and the third joined a few years later. There’s a lovely comfort in knowing that, month after month, I will find the ideas and energy required to send some written work out by the deadline, and, after receiving their work, will make the time to read, re-read, and consider my fellow writers’ words so that I have critiques written and ready in time for our meeting. After a while, that rhythm became a part of my metabolic expectation; on the rare occasions that we agree to disrupt our schedule, I feel the loss.
We’re only together once a month – and for the last two years, only via video. The rest of the time we lead our separate lives. But those women are an important part of my life. Our little writing community informs my identity as a person who cares about writing. It also invites me, through the best kind of peer pressure, to keep writing so that I have something to send out a week before our next meeting. Over the years, when times were difficult, sometimes that was the only writing, outside my journal, that I managed to do in a month. It would not have been written, absent my commitment to the group.
Silent Writing Zoom
Another kind of writing community has shown up in my life more recently. At the new year began, I noticed Jana’s invitation in an email group for creativity coaches: “I am hosting a free hour of ‘writing together’ time on Zoom for the month of January. Every Monday-Friday from 8:00-9:00 am Eastern Time, I'll be there, open the room, and we’ll just - write! Cameras are off, you can stay as long as you want, and you can work on whatever you want. It’s just a way to commit to writing practice and start off 2022 on the right foot. Feel free to join - whether you consider yourself a writer or not!”
I replied at once, and spent the rest of January writing in silence with others in Jana’s Zoom room, on most weekdays for the hour between 8 and 9 am. To be honest, other parts of my morning routine were shaken up by this sudden change, and I needed to figure out new accommodations to make it all work. I’m glad that I did. Similarly, a journaling group I belong to offers monthly “alone together” writing sessions.
This model, of voluntarily joining together in a silent virtual meeting, feels wonderful. Maybe it’s my Quaker grandmother’s influence, but I don’t think that’s all there is to it. These daily shared writing sessions offer a clear energetic boost to me, and, I presume, to the others who continue to show up. A quick search for “silent writing zoom” resulted in numerous opportunities for this kind of group, around the world. The pandemic was a catalyst, it seems, for writing opportunities that are simple, free, nonjudgmental, and adaptable to different times of day.
Habits That Are All Good
Whether from a long-term group relationship with fellow writers who share their work and their creative intentions, or from a pick-up group of silent writers you haven’t met and whose work you may never see, the common, nourishing thread is of shared purpose. Doggedly continuing month after month – or day after day – we model for one another the best kind of stubborn creative commitment. Good habits can be hard to come by, and these are all good.
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A M (Anne) Carley writes fiction and nonfiction for and about creative people making functional, satisfying lives. After careers in arts management, online publishing, and intellectual property law, she now owns and operates Anne Carley Creative, which provides creative coaching and editing to people who work with words. She works with her clients on #becomingunstuck.
