Progress reports

This month, one of our members is writing a spy novel while our zombie apocalypse guy (his words) continues his third novel in his series. Another member is hoping to get onto a creative writing course (fingers crossed), another faces the challenge of writing in their second language. Finally, one writer is thinking about colonising Mars, and I muddle along with my story.

Free writing

Our prompt for this month’s free-writing session was an item from my bag of goodies, recently added to by items from Christmas crackers.

The bag of goodies is not my idea: it came to me from Rosie Johnston, who has her own bag of goodies that she likes to pass out at the writing meetings she leads. She’s something of a mentor to me, and I pass on a lot of her knowledge to the Ely writers. It’s been suggested I pay her commission!

Inside my bag of goodies are all sorts of different things designed to inspire the person who selects it to start writing. There’s no way to fail at this exercise, unless you don’t write anything at all. Sometimes, a writer will only write one sentence, but that’s one sentence more than they had at the start of the exercise. It doesn’t even matter if the chosen object isn’t mentioned in the piece: that’s not the challenge. The challenge is simply to write.

Having said that, I was disappointed with what I wrote. I chose a character who is currently stuck in his world of misery, and all I did was continue that. It – deliberately – makes for dreary reading, but at some point, this character must snap out of it and move on.

Discussion

Some of us managed to catch the pantomime one of our members wrote when it was shown last month. We saw the Saturday evening production, which was performed by a youth drama group. One boy completely stole the show, and even had his own fan club in the row behind me.

The pantomime itself was a hoot, and we enjoyed discussing it with its author at this month’s meeting.

Readings

We heard one reading this month. One writer is focusing on the beginning of her story, and wanted suggestions for how to improve it.

We gave her some constructive ideas, but advised her not to dwell on the beginning, but to move on because otherwise she’s preventing her own progress at getting her first draft down.

It’s easy to get bogged down by the start; I’ve done it myself. At a creative writing course, the tutor was talking about where to start the story – could it be started later to omit dull stuff? Instead of making a note of this for when I reached the editing process, I got sucked in and started playing around with where the story started. I faffed with this for so long, I made no real progress with the first draft. Once I realised this, I moved on, letting future me worry about that instead.

Next meeting

Our next meeting will be on 1 March 2023. Will you be there?