Zoom Link: Writing for Change February 2025

What do you need to write?

Can you believe that another month has gone by?! One positive, I suppose, is that we are another few weeks closer to saying goodbye to grey skies and - here in Somerset at least - thick squelchy mud.

On Thursday evening at 6.30pm we will meet for this month’s Writing for Change. All are welcome, whether you have been to the group before or whether this is your first time, and no matter where you are in your writing journey. We are a friendly and supportive bunch, and our aim as a group is simply to make space in our busy lives to write - and hopefully change something.

This month I have been thinking about what we ‘need’ to write, and when I typed this sentence in the subhead above, I realised it works in two ways.

I notice that substack at the moment is very much a community of writers with lots of people talking about their own writing process.

But as with all social media, you have to have something to share.

Advice. Start your day with a brisk walk and note down three things you observe!

Images. Look at my beautiful writing hut, with its minimal decor and view of the mountains.

Or you have to have something to sell.

Courses. Come on my six week course and get that novel into shape!

Retreats. Sit in our tranquil manor house with fellow creatives and discuss your WIP!

And as with all social media, the aim of all of this is most often good and pure - to help, to share skills, to make a living - but when you are bombarded with a lot of it, it can start to feel counter-productive.

“I don’t have a set of notebooks filled with my observations!”

“I don’t have a light oak desk and a cork board to lay out my plot!”

“I can’t afford that fancy retreat!”

But do we need any of this, to write?

Let’s come together and explore what we need to write…and that brings us to the second meaning of the phrase, so let’s explore that too…

What do we need to write?

For me, it’s the subject or idea that grabs me, that I feel a deep need to write about. It’s that feeling of having something that needs to come out that takes me to the page, and I don’t need any fancy writing cabin when that happens. I just feel that ‘writer fire’. And I have to get it down.

Are you writing what you need to write about? Or what other people - your partner, your agent, your parent, your teacher from 1989, your bank manager - need you to write about?

Let’s explore all of this and more on Thursday night.

All you need to bring is passion and a pen! Some of us light a candle in the background, to represent that writer fire.

See you then. Zoom link to follow…after the paywall…

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