How My Women’s Writing Group Vents Together Instead of Tearing Work to Shreds

When I started writing a novel based on the story of Cupid and Psyche, I fell apart. I completed a hundred pages that covered the Greco-Roman pantheon before realizing I needed to focus only on my one new Internet goddess. I showed my fiasco to a kind, well-intentioned reader who happened to have an obsession with the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s theory of cognition. “If this goddess knows everything on the Internet, how does that affect her consciousness?” he asked.

I had no idea, so I quit writing from my goddess’s point of view and settled instead for those of the novel’s male mortals. The more I tried, the worse it got, until I stopped. I left my novel in its appalling state and considered it a failure for numerous years afterward. Meanwhile, although I continued writing short stories, they never seemed perfect enough for me to submit them to publications.

More recently, though, I’m realizing that I’ve been working too hard on the revision of my writing and not enough on the rest. The most important part of finishing a novel is keeping the faith, not getting it right. I reached this epiphany thanks to the “Heroine’s Circle Writing Project,” a women’s group founded by Melissa Rosati, a former editorial director at McGraw-Hill International who has worked as a life coach.

During my first meeting in January 2019, Rosati gave everyone a worksheet that raised more important questions than “is your story working?” Taking a nurturing, maternal approach rather than a problem-solving one, she wanted to know if we were working. Had we figured out how to make the time? Who was supporting us? Had we found the money to survive? When I finished answering Rosati’s questions, I decided to devote more thought to finding mentors and to finishing my manuscript.

Instead of holding a revision-focused workshop, Rosati had the Heroines meet once a month to discuss the book Women Who Run With the Wolves, in which Clarissa Pinkola Estés analyzes ancient stories to unearth the cultural assumptions that restrain women’s creativity. During the first meeting I attended, we read about the nobleman Bluebeard, whose bride discovers that the corpses of his former wives are hanging in a forbidden room. “Who is the Bluebeard in your creative life?” Melissa asked.

We took turns venting about our guilt complexes, time-sucking boyfriends, fears, feelings of inferiority. . . anyone who writes already knows this list. Eventually we walked out to 34th street and howled like wolves to the Manhattan skyline. None of the New Yorkers passing by us blinked at the sight.

After our book group meetings, we self-dubbed Heroines came together again on a Saturday morning at 10 a.m. For two hours, we tapped at our computer keyboards, and then each of us shared something short. We offered more positive feedback than criticism during these sessions, and nobody competed. For example, when someone said to me “nothing I write is good,” I knew the unofficial feminine code required me to bolster her with “that’s not true!” I didn’t learn much during these write-ins about how to improve, but I came away with the conviction that I could.

Whenever I lost faith, I told the Heroines, since I knew they too would follow the feminine code and bolster me. For example, in July 2019, I struggled to decide whether to go to Readercon, a science fiction convention in Boston that entailed taking a bus from New York, booking a room, and facing men who’d tell me how much they’d accomplished. “Why, when I can network with editors at readings here?” I said.

My friends rolled their eyes and asked me what I had to lose, so in the last minute I ended up going. While there, I met wonderful people, some of whom I emailed afterward; the writer, editor and academic Mary Anne Mohanraj advised me to start a website, which inspired me to launch Writingmythology.com this September.

Preparing blog posts during the past year has been gratifying. Usually, I read my first drafts to the Heroines, and they almost unfailingly reward me with praise.

“You’re the Dorothy Parker of mythology,” Rosati said to me once.

With her permission, I put that quote written in large font on my website homepage. Maybe I’m starting to act like those men at Readercon, telling people how much I’ve accomplished before it happened, but I don’t care. I want people to see what Rosati said before they form their own opinions.

Thanks to the Heroines, I mustered the courage to set myself a goal last year: submit a piece of fiction every week. Now, I’ve placed two satires with the humor website Points in Case, a third with Little Old Lady Comedy, and a fourth is scheduled to appear in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency on May 4, 2021.

And what about my Internet goddess? In my current draft, I keep her perspective in the novel, although I’ve made her start out this time as a mortal. I’ve been writing 1500 words a week and completed about 250 pages, not including the hundred I threw away years ago. I’m further along now than I ever managed and I’m feeling optimistic, although this could always change. We’ll see. If I stumble again, at least this time I can turn to a writing group that will pick me up from the ground.

—

https://www.writingmythology.com

https://twitter.com/writingmyth

https://www.instagram.com/writingmythology/

Biography:

Sonja Ryst’s satire has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Points in Case, and Little Old Lady Comedy. She founded the humor website Writingmythology.com in September 2020. A former staff reporter at BusinessWeek.com (now Bloombergbusinessweek), she has published nonfiction in The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Wall Street Journal, and TheStreet.com, as well as numerous other publications.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: How To and Tips