please look at these amazing illustrations Ursula K. LeGuin did for one of her essays on writing workshops:
"The Writer is liable to feel like a little, tiny person all alone in a desert where the sand is words. Giant figures of Best-Sellers and Great Authors loom over her like statues—Look on my works, ye puny, and despair!—This lonely, sitting-there person may find that in a work-centered workshop she can draw on the kind of group support and collaborative rivalry, the pooled energy, that actors, dancers, and musicians, all performing artists, draw on all the time.
And so long as ego-tripping is discouraged, the process of the workshop, depending on mutual aid, stimulation, emulation, honesty, and trust, can produce an unusually pure and clear form of that energy.
The participant may be able to carry some of that energy home, not having learned “how to write,” but having learned what it is to write.
I think of a good workshop as a pride of lions at a waterhole. They all hunt zebras all night and then they all eat the zebra, growling a good deal, and then they all come to the waterhole to drink together. Then in the heat of the day they lie around rumbling and swatting flies and looking benevolent. It is something to have belonged, even for a week, to a pride of lions." (from The Wave in the Mind, 2004)
Scheduling coworking sessions with friends with this exact energy. Have spent a bit too long ALONE IN THE DESERT OF WORDS, must now HEAD TO THE WATERHOLE for the sake of my sanity
