writing group meeting #5

(edit: sorry guys! I had thought I'd posted this, but I only just realized I'd pressed 'save' instead. This is what happens when I rush.)

The subject of our fifth meeting revolved around voice. We began as we did in our last meeting: by drafting questions we wished our groupmates would respond to. It was easier this time, now that we had more experience and generally knew what to expect. We didn't have to rely on each other as much, and the whole process went quicker.

Our next step was to determine each of our five-star quotes. This took a bit. Picking a passage from our own pieces that would stand as the perfect example of what we each thought our own voices to be was a bit of a daunting prospect. In retrospect, we all agreed it would almost have been easier if we each shared our pieces and had our groupmates agree on a quote that they thought best portrayed our individual voice. It's more difficult to choose ourselves, since we are all so familiar with our own personal writing styles. Sometimes a different perspective.

Yet, in the end we still managed to select passages we felt did us justice and then presented them to our group. It was actually incredibly interesting seeing the differences in all our styles when presented in such a straight-forward way. This concept led us to a small tangent on how voice is something like a writer's fingerprint: each one individual. Which in turn, led to a tangent off a tangent in which we all compared our fingerprints.

We got back on track though, when we decided to each take a turn reading each of our "voice-filled quotes" aloud. We went in a circle, the person whose quote it was being the one last in line to read, so as not to influence the other groupmates. This process was beneficial as well as fun, since we took the advice of the sheet given to us and played up our reading, over-dramatizing the voice but still doing our best to portray what we get from the quote. By the end, we were all sore from laughing yet still left with a much broader view of the voice in our piece.

The last fifteen minutes we spent discussing the questions we had drafted at the beginning of our meeting. Most of them actually directly addressed voice, so we spent the remainder of our time comfortably tossing ideas back and forth in regards to each of our questions, lightly discussing the changes we've made to our pieces and how we thought it all was going, sometimes slipping off into minor digressions but bringing ourselves back every time.

Once again, another victorious L.A.D.I.E.S meeting. Huzzah, sisters. Huzzah.