Thank you to everyone who came to the meeting this month.

Free writing

This month, our free-writing session took as its inspiration a bag of mystery objects. The idea here is to pick an object without looking, and to use it to inspire your writing.

I cannot claim this as my original idea, although I did provide all the objects in the bag. This idea came from Rosie Johnston, who advocates writing prompts as a way to get started. We spend five minutes writing, then we see how we got on. Occasionally, we might read out what we’ve written, but there’s no compulsion.

I picked a spent shotgun cartridge, which I’d found on the ground somewhere in the fenland countryside. I was glad to find a use for it!

What would you have written?

Discussion

We discussed, amongst other things, how to set the time period of a novel without explicitly saying it’s set in a particular year. Many novels are contemporary with when they’re written; however, mine is set at the end of the twentieth century, but I don’t want to make it explicit.

Instead, I aim to include references to the times and culture of the period. I want these references to be wide-ranging in scope, so that as many of my readers as possible will be able to identify when it’s set. So far, I have references to topics including sport, politics, the law, music, education, high street banks and shops, fashion, technology, cars, films, video games, events, television.

Readings

We didn’t have any readings this month.

Next meeting

We’ll next meet on 6 July 2022 at the same time and same place. Will you join us?