Apologies for this month’s meeting review being late: we’ve been kept busy elsewhere!

Seven familiar faces turned up to this month’s meeting; it’s lovely to see people coming back month after month.

We also had two new faces come along. It’s always wonderful to welcome someone else to our little group. They don’t always come back, but when they do, it’s very rewarding.

Introductions and progress reports

Since the last meeting, we’ve all made progress in one way or another. A group like Ely Writers can keep you accountable as a writer.

• It can feel a bit awkward if you’re reporting no progress month after month after month, even in a friendly and understanding group like Ely Writers; this can be enough to make you want to write something so we can celebrate your progress next time.
• Hearing everyone else’s progress since the last meeting and their enthusiasm for what they’re writing can inspire us to go home and get out our own favourite writing tools, to make our own progress that we can report back at our next meeting.

Joining a writing group like Ely Writers is a great way to let your writing mojo flow!

Free writing

The prompt for this month’s free-writing session was getting older. Most of us imagined getting to the silver-haired years, but some of us wrote about young people getting older.

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: theme

We worked on theme this month. Theme is the big questions that your story asks but doesn’t (necessarily) answer. You can have the characters think about it or discuss it or act on it, and let the reader think about it, hopefully long after they’ve finished your book, and make up their own mind which side of the fence they come down on, if at all they do.

Theme doesn’t always come straight away; sometimes, it can come while you’re working through your first draft or a later draft. It’s important that when you come to editing that you do an edit looking out for where your theme should or shouldn’t crop up, and where it actually does or doesn’t.

You should also try not to preach to the reader; at least one of us has read a book that put us off that author forever because of the one-sided view on a controversial medical topic that was forced down their throat.

Examples of themes include love, world peace, war and family.

During the workshop, we did an exercise learned from Rosie Johnston: we each picked the theme of our novel, if we knew it, and a general one if we didn’t, and sat down with one of our characters for a scribble chat. We talked to that character about the chosen theme to see what they thought about it. Then we brought in another character to see what they thought, while paying attention to the interaction between the two characters as they talked. This will help us write our themes into our work.

Readings

Reading out our work is strictly optional, and we only ever make positive comments on anything you read out. A single negative word can knock a writer’s confidence for six, whereas the point of Ely Writers is to encourage and embolden writers. This is so important, we have rules about readings!

We had just one reading this week, inspired by the free-writing prompt from our last meeting. The great thing about a prompt is that you never know where it will take you. It could give you the start of a new story, help with an existing story or spark an idea for a poem exploring something you’ve not thought about before.

Next meeting

If you like to talk about writing or you’ve written something you’d like to share with other writers, why not come along to our next meeting?

Next month’s meeting is from 6:15 pm till 7:15 pm on Wednesday 3 July 2024 in Prosper.