A small group for people with a serious creative project

Wednesday lunchtimes, 12.30 to 1.30pm UK.
Next round runs for twelve weeks, from 23 September – 9 December 2026

If you’re facing something exciting or alarming, it’s good to have support.

That’s what The Wednesday Group is for. Every Wednesday for twelve weeks, a small group of people with something big on meet for an hour. You say what you did last week and what you’ll do next. Three people each week get ten minutes to use however they want. Then everybody goes back to work.

It sounds slight. It isn’t. Being asked, out loud, by people whose own work you take seriously, is the difference between a project you mean to get to and a project that exists.

This page isn’t an invitation, and asking about it isn’t applying. But if you’d like me to send you the details, now or for a future round, please jp at this domain name.

Where it came from

The first version of this group was set up in 2015, to run as a three-month trial. I had some fairly big things coming up, and invited a group of talented individuals to join me in a weekly get-together online.

I wanted the support of people who could hold me to account, and for whom I could do the same.

It ran several rounds, then stopped for a few years, then came back. This is the first round for a while, and the new name says the thing that matters most about it: you turn up on Wednesdays.

What happens in the hour

The format can vary, to meet specific needs, but essentially it goes like this:

Somebody reads the group rules aloud. They’re listed below, and you might be surprised how much the reading of them does.
Everybody checks in briefly on the week just gone. A minute each.
Three people take ten minutes, to use as they wish.
We break into smaller rooms to say what we’re doing in the week ahead – and post those resolutions afterwards, so we can’t quietly not do them.

The ten minutes are yours. Some people just want to talk, to get an idea out of their head. Others want feedback on a piece of work. I once used mine to interrogate one of the others, who happened to be an expert on something I needed to understand. That is a large part of the point: the room contains a great deal that I don’t.

The focus is very much on getting things done. But the hour is also a good place to say how it’s actually going. In the first round we had the full range of emotion, some raw, some ecstatic, and every round since has been built for saying what’s really happening rather than trying to look good.

What it does

Twelve weeks is a good period. Long enough that you cannot put a thing off indefinitely, short enough that you can see the end from the beginning.

Here is what previous members have come to do:

a book to launch
a website to build
a photography business to restart after lockdown
a language school to extend, and rebrand
a month-long daily newsletter to publish
an art gallery to open
a podcast to launch
an exhibition to put on
a “hobby” to take professional
a start-up to start up
an international awards scheme to launch

And here, in their own words further down this page, is some of what got finished: a website built and launched, a month of daily newsletters completed, a shelved book project brought back and given momentum.

One cohort ran a sprint together: twenty weekdays, twenty emails, each publishing a pop-up daily newsletter to a small list of their own. Not everybody joined in, and nobody was expected to. The ones who did came out of it having published twenty pieces they would otherwise never have written, and you could hear what it had done for them.

That is the sort of thing a room like this throws up.

One of my favourite moments was when a participant, a writer, looked frankly astonished that the rest of us thought she had a great idea for a book – and realised that she would now have to get on with it.

Who is it for?

Invitation only. Members have been people I know at least a little, generally (but not always) self-employed, and professionally engaged in the following areas:

Writing
Visual arts
Photography
Gardening
Marketing
Music
Broadcast
Tech
Speechwriting
Translation
Coaching
Financial literacy

It is deliberately not a writers’ group. A photographer, a translator and somebody launching an awards scheme in the same room will tell each other things that twelve writers never would.

The age range has been broad, on purpose, because that means a greater range of insight and wisdom. Nearly half of the first group lived outside the UK. Three, though fluent, were not native English speakers.

I would like to improve the diversity of the group, in every way.

Who it isn’t for

Worth saying plainly, because it saves us both some time:

You need a project already underway, or genuinely about to be. Not a someday idea you’d like to talk about.
You need to be there every week: Wednesdays, 12.30-1.30pm UK, from 23 September to 9 December. Miss three and you’re a passenger, and the group can tell.
It costs money.
It’s mutual. You’re there to take other people’s work as seriously as your own. If what you want is to be listened to, it’s the wrong room.
What’s said in the room stays in the room.

What you get

✅ The weekly hour on Zoom, every Wednesday from 23 September to 9 December 2026, 12.30 to 1.30pm UK time.

✅ A private group for participants to share work and messages between sessions. That’s on Signal, which is like WhatsApp but with better encryption, and not owned by Meta, hurrah.

✅ Two one-to-one conversations with me, 30 minutes each, whenever they’d be most useful to you. October is easiest for me, because November is busy with the Micro-Memoir course, but I’d rather you had them when you need them. More if you need it and if I can.

✅ An insider view of my own work in progress, which may inspire you or give you a sense of what to avoid.

✅ Confidentiality, and the freedom to be honest that comes with it.

What are the group rules?

Be committed, with clarity of purpose (whatever it is).
Show up to every meeting.
Come prepared.
Give encouragement and support.
There is no hierarchy of achievement. We’re all just trying to do what we set out to do.
Don’t share elsewhere who you see or what you hear.

Time commitment

It’s important that you attend every week if possible, and that you come on time. If you don’t think that’s going to be possible, please don’t apply this time round. Mutual support is fundamentally based on being there for each other, if only for one hour a week.

Before each session, you’ll need a few minutes to prepare:

a one-minute summary of what you achieved in the last week
a willingness to take ten minutes on a specific project, problem, opportunity, big win or crazy idea, and get the group’s response to it
a one-minute summary of what you’ll do in the week ahead (it may change during the hour, but it’s good to start with something)

Who runs it

I have run seven of these groups since 2015, and I’m good at running them. That is the qualification that matters most here, so I’ll put it first.

I trained in coaching with CTI (Californian, but we did it in London), and have done hundreds of hours of one-to-one coaching. I’ve done a great deal of group facilitation, much of it stemming from my training in theatrical improvisation – I once got about a hundred people onto a stage, out of an audience of five thousand. For seven years I ran classes at The School of Life in London.

I’ve also done a lot of one-to-one and group therapy, as the patient. Strong feelings sometimes arrive in this group, and they don’t alarm me.

I’m the author of eight books, including A Modest Book About How To Make An Adequate Speech, which was published during the first round, and most recently A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown. I worked for many years as a feature writer and editor on The Financial Times and The Sunday Times, interviewing well known people and taking a variety of jobs – taxi driver, assistant undertaker, high-rise window cleaner – in order to write about them.

I’ve also run an email-based course, Micro-Memoir, four times – thirty days in which somebody builds a short book out of material they already have.

I don’t ask people to do things I haven’t done. To test my own theory that a book can be made in a month, I made one: A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown, put together from pictures I already had and the personal story behind them. I wrote it in public, sending out accounts of the work to a pop-up email list as I went. The people following along cheered me on, and many of them bought the finished book.

And I don’t only write. In the past year I’ve had two solo exhibitions, and I sold a collection of pictures by email alone, without a gallery. I’ve run this website since about 2002, I make my own podcast, and I’ve been self-employed since 2005. If what you’re trying to do is get your own work in front of people without waiting for permission, I’ve done it recently, and I can tell you what it actually took.

I say all this because some of it may be useful to you. But the reason to be in the room is not me. It’s that a dozen or more people with real projects, several of whom will know things I don’t, are going to take your work as seriously as you’d like to. I convene that, and I’m good at convening it. What happens inside it belongs to everybody.

Why I charge

Shifting from being “just” a writer to doing the other things I’ve mentioned was rewarding – astonishing, really – and also extremely difficult.

I had been happy as a journalist, on prestigious titles, but the industry was torn apart by digital media and the future looked bleak. I ventured into the areas listed above and got by, for a long time, on sheer self-will. I’ve achieved quite a lot, and I’ve been fortunate.

But it exhausted me, and I ended up in a psychiatric hospital. I still do most of the work myself. What I know now is that doing it without real, meaningful support is a way of paying for it later.

I charge for this group because I’ve found, against my hopes and expectations, that people undervalue what they don’t pay for. The fee is what makes the Wednesday hour survive contact with a busy week.

Testimonials

A gang of amazing people rooting for you, supporting you, motivating you, offering valuable feedback and thoughts regarding whatever it is you want to ask them – and I love being able to offer my two cents worth when it’s another person’s turn. The main thing I achieved? Successfully completing the month-long pop-up Newsletter Challenge.

- J.C.F., participant

Thank you JP and everyone, it’s been such a pleasure to find a new group of people to really form connections with. Most of all, it’s been such an open and honest space and I’ve really admired the way everyone has embraced that. Being part of the group has made me braver about being creative… I’ve made lasting connections at a time when life has felt often very disconnected.

- P.S., participant

I get new ideas and perspectives discussing projects others are working on. I can often apply these thoughts on my own projects. It helped me to verbalise processes and plans, what I want to achieve, and how to achieve it. Sharing in a sort of team gives me a chance to feel more supported in my work. I finished my website to a state that I have launched it online!

- J.vB., participant

This was incredibly useful, both in the group and the one-to-ones. Things that were on the back-burner have been given the attention they deserve, to be more than a hobby. And you couldn’t ask for a nicer group, there’s nobody I wouldn’t want to have with me on a desert island. I was worried about fitting it in, but it was a great thing to look forward to.

- A.G-Q., participant

What a lovely group of people. It has made me think about all the creative people across the globe struggling to impose a good balance in their lives of things they need to do to survive physically, alongside things they want to do, to survive mentally. You have all impressed me with your vigour and grip on the modern way of promoting yourselves and making an incision for yourselves in a very crowded world.

- H.P., participant

I have loved being part of this encouraging and supportive group. Thank you so much for creating and running it. It has been wonderful to get to know a new circle of people, especially at a time when the opportunity for social connection is so limited. The weekly check-in has also helped me stay focused on working on the book project and gain some vital momentum.

- R.W., participant

I have found it an excellent focus for the week, have looked forward to hearing others’ varied experiences, ups and downs – it was very inclusive and uplifting, especially for those of us who work from home alone much of the time, which can be quite isolating. I was especially delighted with the positive reception for my long-shelved book idea, which provided a much-needed confidence boost. I have considered it a privilege to hear about others’ work lives and challenges, and the open-minded honesty and mutual support expressed have been very refreshing in a social media world of either rose-tinted self-representation or barbed opinions.

- F.W., participant

Finding out more

Because of how interactive the hour is, I’ve always limited numbers: no more than 25 people, a whole Zoom screenful.

I’m looking for the best possible mix of people, with a hunger to be part of it. For that reason it’s by invitation.

But this page isn’t an invitation, and asking for details isn’t applying. If you’d like to know more – now, or for a future round – please jp at this domain name. If you already know you’re interested, write to me answering these two questions:

What would you like to get out of The Wednesday Group (bare minimum)?
And what would be an insanely ambitious outcome?

I’ll come back to you with the fee, how to pay, and anything else you want to know. Getting in touch doesn’t commit you to anything.

And if this isn’t for you, you may well know who it is for. I’d be glad if you passed it on.

JPF