Apologies for this month’s meeting review being late: there have been continued technical difficulties with the server. We’ve been in touch with our hosting provider, and we hope these problems are now fixed.

Eight Ely Writers turned up to this month’s meeting; some were people who haven’t been for a while and some were regular attendees. We’re glad to see you all!

Introductions and progress reports

Some of us have made progress, either on our main projects or on a side project, but others have found they’re struggling with different aspects or haven’t made much progress with their writing since the last meeting. We aim to help all our members with their writing, so we suggested a couple of things. We’ll maybe look into these problems in depth in an upcoming meeting.

Free writing

The prompt for this month’s free-writing session was getting lost.

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: plot (through-line)

We’ve done a workshop on through-line before, but it’s been a while, and most of our current attendees weren’t members back then. We thought it might be a good idea to go through the same exercise 1 as previously.

Those of us who were working on the same piece chose a lesser character whose through-line might give us a subplot, something which some writers may struggle with. Subplots are something to cover another time.

We had mixed results: some already knew their through-line, although this exercise helped crystallise it; others hadn’t known their through-line, and so found it. One person even used the character from their free-writing exercise to develop the through-line for that.

Readings

Just the one reading this time: a continuation of a story we heard a couple of meetings ago. An ominous atmosphere was created using the weather and the environment. It was really good to hear how this work is progressing, and we look forward to future instalments!

Thank you

This month’s meeting marks our second anniversary in the current format. Many thanks to all the people who’ve come to our meetings, whether only once or to all of them. It’s your contributions that we learn from and are inspired by. It’s you that make our meetings what they are. Ely Writers is all about you and your writing, whatever you’re writing about.

Please do keep coming so we can continue to learn, improve and be inspired together!

Next meeting

If you want to learn more about writing or have something to share with other writers, why not pop along to our next meeting?

Next month’s meeting is from 6:15 pm till 7:15 pm on Wednesday 1 May 2024 in Prosper. See you then?

References

1. Rosie Johnston 2018. Through-line – the single most vital trick in writing a novel. Rosie Johnston Writes