Apologies for this month’s meeting review being late: there were technical difficulties with the site – different ones from last month! This month, we’ve had problems with the server, which may or may not have been fixed.
Ten Ely Writers turned up to this month’s meeting; some were people who haven’t been for a while, some were regular attendees and some were brand new.
Introductions and progress reports
Our writers have been busy since the last meeting, making progress whether with increasing word counts, finding where to start the story, finishing another short story, developing characters or something else. Well done to you all!
We’re keen to watch the talents of all these lovely Ely Writers develop over time, and to see where their writing leads them.
Free writing
The prompt for this month’s free-writing session was fancy dress.
We don’t have to read what we write out, but a few brave souls did. As ever, there were some real gems produced by our writers. It’s amazing what you can come up with in five minutes.
If you’re sick of staring at a blank page, why not set a timer for five minutes, take the first thing you focus on when you look up as your prompt, and see where it takes you. Perhaps you’ll write about how your character would react to the prompt. Perhaps you’ll write about what it means to you. The result, whether guff or good, means your page isn’t blank anymore!
Workshop: Scribble chats
We’ve done a workshop on scribble chats before, but it’s been a while, and most of our current attendees weren’t members back then. Scribble chats are referred to surprisingly frequently during our meetings, so we thought it would be useful to cover them again, starting at the beginning.
We each selected a character, and asked them basic questions about their names, jobs, appearance, and so on. These questions were taken from Rosie Johnson’s big list of scribble-chat questions1. We scribbled down the character’s replies, including any body language. What we got at the end of it was new information about how the character thinks, speaks and moves.
The more we talk to our characters, the deeper our understanding of them, the more easily we can write in their voice, whether in first person or close third person.
Any other business
This month, we heard that a professor at the London School of Economics is doing research on the writing of autobiographies. We have a couple of members who are writing memoirs. Memoirs are subtly different to autobiographies, but we thought it worth asking the professor anyway.
We put out a call for reviews of writing events we’ve attended, but no one has been to anything recently.
Prosper is hosting a second Open Mic Poetry Night on Friday 15 March 2024. The inaugural event was fun, so we’re expecting great things from this one!
Next meeting
Everyone seemed to benefit from our workshop on scribble chats this month, each of us learning something new about our chosen character. If you find scribble chats useful too, why not come and see what you can learn from our next meeting? Or maybe you’ve just found out something brilliant that you must share with other writers – our next meeting would be the perfect place for that!
Our meeting next month is from 7:15 pm till 8:15 pm on Wednesday 6 April 2022 in Prosper. It’ll be our second anniversary of our meetings in theor current format – see you then?
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