Slice of Life: Writing Communities
Image via Julie Johnson For most of my life, my writing has been for myself. It was somehow therapeutic to scratch words with a pen onto a piece of paper. My writing life has certainly ebbed and flowed --- mostly ebbed --- across the years, but writing for myself was always enough. I didn't have to worry about criticism. Didn't have to worry about saying things in the wrong way. Didn't have to worry about working and reworking my thoughts. I just put words on a page, closed the book, and walked away. A long series of events over the last ten years has slowly pushed me toward more public writing. One factor in changing my course has been community. Writing communities have pushed me to put more thought into my writing, to work toward creating stronger messages, to try writing in new ways, to be a bit braver when it comes to sharing the words on a page. Today, for example, this post is part of the collaborative work of the ...