Alec Latham
The context:
I am in awe of some beer writers and they’re as varied and personal as the beer styles they scribe about. What I love is that writing about beer has become such a widespread phenomenon that the bar is constantly being raised. Unfortunately, this also means that there’s ever more competition to beat and to judge your own abilities by.
On July 14th this year, I’ll have been in full time employment for twenty years since plunging in at eighteen - unfortunately my job has nothing to do with beer or writing. It was seeing this anniversary hove into view at the end of 2014 that spurred me to finally start writing and I’ve been keeping it up ever since. I used to be good at writing back in school so hoped I could still churn a readable paragraph. I was thrilled to get published by Hop & Barley in my capacity as an essay writer and later by doing Moor Beer taste comparisons. I’ll also be published in CAMRA’s beer magazine later in the year.
I should make something quite clear right at this point - I don’t really know what I’m doing but I care deeply about the fact I’m doing it. I stopped going to school at fifteen and my highest qualification is my driving licence. I crave to be better at writing. I want it to be as beautiful as Kernel brewery’s Biere de Saison. I hope my passion goes some way to making up for my lack of training.
The field:
There’s plenty to consider if you want to write for an audience. First and foremost, how do readers even know you exist? Assuming the audience gets as far as seeing what you’ve written as a website link, how do you actually hold its attention? I apply this to how I read others’ work. What I read on the computer is different to what I’ll read on a smart phone because of the format. Longer posts will suffer on a phone screen as they’re forced into a narrower vertical channel but be under no doubt - the smartphone is now the primary vector for written articles.
Des De Moor writes about beer but also about walking and I will stay with him through a 5000 word post even though (pun completely intended) it’s a trek. But I still need to wait until I get back home and fire up the computer for him.
Short posts of several paragraphs are more likely to be read from start to finish so I can easily manage pub curmudgeon whilst standing at a bar. Personally, I like to write substantial posts because there’s a lot I want to get down. Retrospectively, I hope I learn a tiny lesson each time.
I’d like it if someone was suggesting ways I might improve this short post right now. What I need is someone to tell me when only I find something I’ve written funny or when I’m rambling, going off on a pointless tangent, splitting paragraphs apart or misguidedly forcing others together. I need to know what the reader thinks and at what point I cease to be original, make sense or merit its attention.
The solution:
I don’t believe I’m alone in wanting this kind of feedback as us writers want to be read and remembered. We want to improve our game. This is why I’ve set up a London-based group through the website Meetup called The London Beer Writers. It’s been a slow start but if you are London-based or London-centric (I live in St Albans) and would like constructive feedback about your writing, please join it - it’s completely free.
It works like this: We meet up in a quiet pub with a good beer range and bring our written work on laptops or printed out. However many there are, we offer our work in a circular way round the table so if there were four of us, we’d take the member’s work from the left and give ours to the right. We’d then repeat this so everyone’s work had been seen by every other member. Each time we’d make notes about what we think (constructively of course) and when everybody’s read everyone else’s work, we offer our feedback to the writers one by one. This way we can get a better insight into our strengths and weaknesses and exploit and address them respectively.
If our thoughts are dry, I’ll supply a paper with little questions to get some responses coming. Above all, I’d like to help you and learn from you. So how about it?
After that, we relax with a few beers. It is after all what motivates us ;-)
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