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The First Novelist's Club is a weekly support meeting that I started for aspiring novelists, screenwriters, playwrites, poets and non-fiction writers in and around the Fylde Coast, Lancashire. That makes it sound like group therapy, which it is in a way.
We bring a thick wodge of words each session and hand it over to the rest of the group who give an honest, impartial critique of the work. True, you need a thick skin to take some of the comments passed but we are all in the same boat so the empathy is implicit in each discussion.
The quality of the writing is good. There is no doubt that some of this work will be picked up by a publisher as soon as it is suitably polished. Often it is the last, crucial, 5% that makes the difference between being slung back in the drawer or seeing it on the bookshelves of Waterstone's.
Maybe we should call ourselves the Five Per Cent Group.
