LMFAW prides itself on building confidence in our members about their writing skills
There are several steps in this process. This is what you need to do:
1. Bring a short piece of writing to critique. There, the members will, in a friendly manner point out the best things about your writing. They will also help you identify areas of weakness and suggest ways you can build up these areas.
2. The next step is to submit a piece of your writing to MacMuse, our in-house newsletter. Linda wants to publish, for our group readership only, as wide a range of pieces as possible. She doesn’t want to keep publishing stuff from those of us who have confidence to enter competitions or publish our work to the wider community. It really helps to build confidence when you see your work in print alongside other writing.
3. The third step is to enter a competition for a short story or poem. Your piece of prose writing could be a true short story from memoir or something from your imagination. Just going through the process makes you feel more like a real writer. Don’t expect to win first time. There has to be lots of entries to make a competition worthwhile.
4. LMFAW has a group affiliation with Hunter Professional Arts. Our member, Elizabeth Horwitz, is president of HPA and editor of its magazine. She is always looking for written pieces to publish. She likes poems, memoir pieces, short stories, items of historical interest, items about art of any kind, book and film reviews etc. Whilst this means putting yourself out into the community, it is still a smaller audience than all of NSW or Australia. There are only a couple of hundred people on the mailing list, so this is another baby step.
5. You might have an ambition to write a family history or a memoir for your extended family, or a novel. When you have reached this stage, you bring to critique those parts where you are struggling. There’s always some aspect of the whole that just doesn’t seem to sit right. Around the table, we brainstorm ideas for you that will usually end up breaking the ideas’ blockage. We also have members who are willing to proof-read or be beta readers before you get to the publication stage.
6. Yay! In six baby steps, you have reached the stage of pitching your book to a regular publisher or you have decided to go it alone and self-publish. We can help you all along this pathway, because a few of us have already been there.
Lake Macquarie Branch, Fellowship of Australian Writers 