The Aquarium of the Writing Group

Posted by Anjuelle Floyd | Filed under Articles and Essays, Musings

Creative writing teacher Kendall Williams sees Morningside Writers’ Group as an aquarium where participants can embrace their vulnerabilities.

Anyone who has ever tended and aquarium, particularly salt water aquariums, knows how delicate their atmosphere and the tedium required in maintaining a safe balance of salt to water along with other factors to ensure longevity of the life for its inhabitants.

Likewise, the best writing groups hold a delicate balance between attention to craft and psyche towards the effort of facilitating participants in crafting clear, but moving and poignant stories.

The best works of creative writing reveal protagonists yearning and striving for survival. Developing a character with desires that pulsate upon the page requires writers to access our vulnerabilities.

Writing groups that provide a safe and respectful atmosphere yet all the while coaxing and challenging the writer assist writers in allowing their own vulnerabilities to inform them about those of their characters.

Kendall Williams compares writers to jelly fish–delicate, but able to strike at a moment’s impulse with our words.

The words we write or type can either infuse life into a character, resurrect old wounds or impale our readers. As a screenwriter/dramatist who loves teaching creative fiction, Kendall challenges his students to make peace with their vulnerabilities, and settle into them.

“Let the possibilities bleed upon the page,” he encourages. His oft heard pronouncement, “Now listen up boys and girls,” when calling participants to attention reveals his task as sage and parent.

“Writing, telling one’s story or that of another is spiritual seduction.”

It pulls on the heart,” Kendall says. And thus the need for writers to peer into the character’s life through the lenses of our own fears and weaknesses, our own aches and joys, disappointments and sadnesses, heartbreaks and spiritual triumphs.

The words we write must inform the reader of crux of our protagonist’s experience, both internally and externally. For that we must continually examine and utilize understanding of the various states of our own human condition along the continuum of highs and lows.

Like learning and adhering to craft, this too forms the blood sweat and tears of telling stories.

How much does and understanding of your personality inform your ability to analyze and hold compassion for your characters?