Some of our regular members couldn’t make it this month, but, thanks to recent the poetry open mic night and some of us bumping into another writer when we met a couple of weeks ago for , we had three new members this month.
Introductions and progress reports
Caity has finished her scribble chat with her character – because the character marched out after 25 pages of A4! But she should be able to find enough material to be able to continue the conversation between that character and her main character. This conversation is crucial to these two characters trusting each other. She has met a few of the other Ely Writers to write together, which has proved most beneficial to all concerned.
One of Caity’s writing buddies writes non-fiction for a living, and is trying to get back into writing fiction by creating short stories and flash fiction. A long story looks like it might be better as a podcast, so that’s exciting: we haven’t had a podcast writer before!
Greg is still ploughing through his zombie apocalypse series, although he might have added a few thousand more words than he expected during the editing process! He’s confident he can trim them down to only those words that are necessary, though.
Our end-of-days crime-thriller writer wrote her first book at the age of eight – and that book is now in the school library. Impressive!
We welcomed a new writer that Caity met at the poetry night; she also writes non-fiction for a living and is looking to escape back into the world of fiction. She told us a friend had recommended The Artist’s Way[1]. It’s aimed at reaquainting you with your creativity.
The writer that we met randomly as some of us were writing together – Kate – came along this month. She’s been writing since childhood, but had to take a break over the last year or two. Now she’s committed to publishing one short story a month[2] on Substack[3]. A couple of us have read some of those stories, and we each found something to admire.
Another writer from the poetry night is also into writing short stories in the horror genre. If they’re as good as the poetry we heard at the open mic night, the world of horror is about to get interesting!
Finally, another poet from the open mic night is writing a book that he hopes will help at least one other person in a dark place. I hope he achieves that. He’s also considering podcasting because he finds his writing comes out the way he talks, so it might be a more natural medium for him.
Free writing
This month, we brought out the bag of goodies – and no, you can’t have the bag! – as our prompt.
We each took an object from the bag and wrote about it either from their own point of view or from the point of view of one of their characters or a completely new character.
Caity picked out the spanner, and went on to show that her stalker might think of himself as a manly man who can instinctively do manly things (like put together flat-pack furniture), he cannot.
Our end-of-days crime-thriller writer got the little (empty) gin bottle; she showed how gin still deserves its moniker mother’s ruin[4].
Discussion
We talked about a lot of stuff this month.
Writing buddies
A few of us have met up to write together in the last couple of weeks or so, and we enthused about it at this meeting!together. Meeting writing buddies is great because it forces you to set aside time to focus on writing, even if it’s only for an hour. When you get home again, your new-found motivation might just spur you into writing more than you could ever imagine.
We decided to make it a regular-ish, semi-offical thing, so we’re going to meet most Wednesdays from 1:00 pm till 6:00 pm, generally in Grain Culture: Bake Shop – General Store. We’ll skip the weeks when we have a meeting.
Free writing and time-boxing
Another tip is free-writing. One member found that when she starts writing that day, the first bit is rubbish, but then she finds her stride and goes from there. Free writing is helpful because it helps get rid of the dross and it gets rid of that blank page staring at you.
If you set a timer for 5 minutes before you start writing freely, it creates a fixed amount of time – a manageable amount of time – in which to write. Once the timer goes off, you can stop, knowing you’ve done more writing than you had done five minutes ago. Contrarily, you might find that you don’t want to stop: even better! Keep going until you’re done, then look at everything you’ve just written with pleasure. It might not be brilliant – first draft rarely is – but you can worry about that later, during the editing stage.
Beta readers
A couple of people were interested in some sort of beta reading system that we could set up. We don’t have anything in place at the moment that would accommodate that, but we’re going to look into it. Ideally, it:
- will be free of charge because I don’t want to ask people to pay to be an Ely Writer
- won’t be provided by a company that is known to spy on their users or which will give unscrupulous AI bots data from which to create books supposedly written by a particular person[5].
We haven’t thought of any other criteria yet, but The Write Practice has written at length[6] about beta readers: what they are, how to find them and how to use their feedback. They even provide a free, downloadable beta-reader questionnaire!
If you fancy being a beta reader for one of our members, please let us know!
Podcasts
A couple of people are into podcasts, so we had a couple of recommendations.
The first was A Beautiful Anarchy[7], which one member finds really motivational
.
The second was a series of monologues by Brian ‘Limmy’ Limond, a Glaswegian comedian, that have been converted into podcasts[8]. These monologues seem very much like streams of consciousness, which might be useful for our last-mentioned aforementioned writer above.
Readings
Long-time member Greg read out a short piece he’d written with another writing group he’s in. It was about trees; he took his story a different way to his co-members. It was atmospheric, evocative of a dense forest, and left us wanting to know more.
Any other business
We had lots of other business this month:
- Our friends at Artemis Writers are hosting another of their workshops at Prosper; more details at Creative writing workshop: fundamentals of plot.
- We shared the creation of our Ely Writers group on goodreads; not sure how much interest there was!
- I was to thank one member, on behalf of another member, for mentioning the Tim Clare podcast a couple of meetings ago; details of this podcast are available on our resources page. Alas that member wasn’t there, but it was a good excuse to share the podcast with other writers who might not have heard of it.
Next meeting
In a temporary change to our regular schedule, we next meet on Wednesday 11 October 2023 in the second week of the month at the regular time of 7:15 pm till 8:15 pm in the regular place of Prosper. See you then?
(Back to normal in November!)
References
- . The Artist’s Way at 30: Alicia Keys, Pete Townshend and the surprising re-birth of a creativity classic in the Guardian.
- at Substack: Messy Notebook, Messy Kitchen.
- Substack: a new economic engine for culture.
- no date. Mother’s ruin in Historic UK.
- . I would rather see my books get pirated than this (or why goodreads and Amazon are becoming dumpster fires) at Jane Friedman.
- no date The ultimate guide to beta readers: definition, why they matter and how to find them at The Write Practice
- Limmy’s World of Glasgow.
- A Beautiful Anarchy.