Thank you to everyone who came to our second meeting this month.

New venue: Revive Coffee

We didn’t have as many people as last month, but we did meet in our new venue, Revive Coffee, a vegan coffee shop in the gym on Broad Street, Ely. It is much more suitable for our meeting, although we need to change our meeting time from 7 pm to 7:15 pm to allow time for clearing up after the book club that also meets in Revive on Wednesday evenings, which finishes at 7 pm.

Free writing

After the introductions and progress reports this month, we used a random word generator as a prompt for our free-writing session. This is something we used to do back in the day, and we always found it fun.

The idea is to write a piece that uses the three words that the generator comes up with; on this occasion, we got breakfast, misery and ladder. It’s not always possible in the five minute window to fit all the words in, but that isn’t really the point. The point is to get you writing something, anything. It doesn’t matter whether it’s any good or not, whether you finish it or not. As long as you start writing something, you’ve succeeded in the exercise.

Free writing exercises are a great way to start your writing session. You’ll either get your writer’s block or nonsense out of the way before you start, or you might find you’ve written a gem.

Discussion

After the free writing session, when our creative juices were flowing, we discussed the mechanics of a time machine invented by Buddhist monks. That was a lot of fun, and the writer in question found it really beneficial.

We discussed how a new perspective on Jack the Ripper’s story might go.

It’s always fun to hear the diversity of the stories that the group comes up with, especially when it’s a new take on an old tale. Keep it up, folks!

Readings

We had one reading today, which evoked its scenes with some delightfully horrible turns of phrase, showing how important word choice is.

Next meeting

We’ll next meet on 1 June 2022 in Revive. Will you be there?