When she was in second grade, Elizabeth Corcoran Murray wrote a play about two girls playing with their turtles who are suddenly transported to Mars when a tornado strikes their home. Shortly thereafter, she saw “The Wizard of Oz” for the first time and convinced herself she’d somehow stolen her story from the movie.

“And I never wrote again!” Corcoran Murray said. “At least, until I started this.”

She referred to The Writer’s Connection, a newsletter and loose collective of local writers Corcoran Murray started in 2009. She writes a monthly email with news of writing workshops and interviews with writers from around the Puget Sound, and she sends it to a growing network of professional and amateur writers. Over time, The Writer’s Connection has spawned writing groups and classes. What started as a short newsletter to 33 people now goes out to more than 1,000.

“We had nothing like this in our community when we started,” said Corcoran Murray, who lives on Fox Island and holds some writing classes at her home.

She knew of the Peninsula Writers Association, a past organization that did similar work. And she had taken a few writing classes at Tacoma Community College and the University of Washington.

“But it was like, ‘Well, what do I do next?’ ” Corcoran Murray said. The idea of re-establishing a way for the region’s writers to connect with one another soon began to take shape.

“If you’re a writer, you need to keep learning what works and what doesn’t work,” said Dianne Lynn Gardner, an Olalla resident who recently published her first novel, “Deception Peak,” through a small publishing house in Indiana. Gardner has worked in writing before, in some publicity and journalism capacities, but she said those experiences can’t compare to writing your own story.

“It’s totally different from writing a novel,” Gardner said. “You don’t pour your heart into it.”

Writers use the Connection’s network to contact others in the area who are working on similar stories, in similar genres or to discuss agents, publishers and other ways to spread their work. Maria Hays is an English instructor at Tacoma Community College who said she sometimes meets with others from the network to write together, or just to take walks and discuss plots, characters and their works in progress.

“It’s a wonderful motivation to write,” Hays said of the writers’ community. “This is my third or fourth job, after teaching and being a mom, so (The Writer’s Connection) gets me to keep going.”

Hays is currently working on a novel about a girl and her horse that she intends for readers like her daughter, girls in late elementary school who are reading well above their level.

“I want to create literature that’s smart, and that challenges kids,” she said.

Gardner also was inspired to write for young adults, and she hoped to impart some life lessons through her coming-of-age stories. Her work is targeted more toward boys, like her grandsons who aren’t avid readers.

“I’m an adventure-loving girl,” she said. “I’m not interested in vampire-romance stuff.”

Corcoran Murray said The Writer’s Connection’s network includes writers in a variety of genres. It includes renowned Seattle nonfiction writer Eric Larson and Port Orchard’s Debbie Macomber, who started writing as a stay-at-home mom and has now sold more than 40 million copies of her novels. Corcoran Murray’s focus has been on memoirs – she has completed a full-length account of her time herding goats in France, a work she said is now in the editing process.

“We’re all friends,” Hays said of the fellow writers she’s connected with since she linked with the network. “It’s not competitive. It’s inspiring to hear how well other people are doing.”

Most of the writers hope to bring their work to a wider audience. Hays would like to develop her story into a series; Gardner is already working on the fourth and fifth books in her series and dreams of one day turning her story into a screenplay. Corcoran Murray will begin work with an editor in February and hopes to move toward publication.

The crucial first step, though, was engaging their creativity with the help of The Writer’s Connection. Like Corcoran Murray, Hays had some writing experience but hadn’t seriously considered pursuing writing until she happened upon some of her old work from college a few years ago.

“I thought, ‘Wow, maybe I can write,’ ” Hays said.

That’s the point of The Writer’s Connection, Gardner said: To provide advice and friendship and to nurture any inspiration that local would-be authors might have.

“I don’t know if I could have gotten where I’m at with my writing without all the wonderful people involved, and the community of authors we have here,” Gardner said.