Featured Writer
George Wade
Unlike most people that joined Ayr Writers Club, or any other writers club for that matter, I didn't join to write. Elsie Miller, the founder of the club, spotted this when I was in my second year of membership, took me to the side and told me that I was a member of a writers group, not a literary and debating society. I was ordered to produce something for the next meeting, or else. My effort wasn't too bad and she said she would expect an entry for the next club competition. It was an article on a local place, hero or incident. I chose Mill Street in Ayr and wrote my article. Of course it was abysmal, I fell into the trap that all new writers fall into. Every fact that I had gleaned about that street was poured into my masterpiece. It was a shopping list of facts for the place. Produced on a portable with the hunt and peck school of typing, I still have that article to this day exactly the way it was written. After nearly thirty years of lying in my desk, I took it out one day, rewrote the piece with about a quarter of the information, and had it published. I say this to encourage people and to follow the advice given by many far better writers than myself. Never throw anything away, it could come in handy at a later date.
I'm glad Elsie gave me that talking to for I still enjoy writing articles and do have degree of success in getting them published. My cardinal sin is to get too engrossed in the research with the result that not as much writing is done as should be. It is accepted that writing is a lonely hobby or profession. Being a member of a writers group doesn't make the writing part less lonely. What it does do is give a person other kindred souls that are going or have gone through the same as they are experiencing. Writers are most generous with advice and help for there isn't one, or at least one author that I know of that hasn't had a rejection slip through the letterbox.
That friendship continues when you visit seminars at the Scottish Association of Writers weekend, now held at Erskine Bridge Hotel. You realise that throughout Scotland the problems and frustrations you experience are the same throughout the land. My advice is join a Writers Club and enjoy the benefits that it will give. You will soon realise that you will get back much more than you gave.