My Silent Writing Collective

My family all busy writing
My family all busy writing

I was intrigued and excited to see Doug Belshaw’s Silent Writing Collective pop up on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know why the idea of sitting quietly for an hour with a laptop excites me, but it does. And it doesn’t take much Googling to discover that he’s not the only one to come up with the idea.

In fact I came up with the idea all by myself a few weeks before Doug Belshaw, but in a slightly different context. If you read my previous post you’ll have discerned that both my son and myself are rather poor at handwriting. Like me, he is in the category of handwriters who can write neatly and slowly or messily and fast. We’re both envious of those people who can write neatly and fast. Like my 8 year old daughter for example. She can do both.

So to stop both of us getting out of practice we started a ten minute diary writing session each evening with my entire family. All five of us sit down for ten minutes on a timer and write about our days. We then share our stories with each other.

While it might not sound like it, it’s been really fun, and something we all look forward to. We all have nice looking journals and decent pens to write with. And from the 4-year old (who mainly scribbles) to myself (who’s writing looks like scribbles), we have a great time

Why not have a go yourself? – start a journal; write a blog; or join one of the silent writing collectives that are out there.

2 thoughts on “My Silent Writing Collective”

  1. I agree! It is great stuff! I started the Silent Writers Collective back in 2009 as an in-person effort with some writer friends. After moving away, we continued it online. We found it so effective I opened it up to the online world via Twitter and it had a remarkable following. I’m glad to see it’s still helping writers do what writers must do … write! If you have any questions about it, please let me know.

Leave a Reply to Olivia Tejeda Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • Social Slider