Thank you to everyone who came to the meeting this evening, especially as the meeting was moved from the first Wednesday in September to the second.

This month, we looked at what the old writing adage write what you know means.

• Writing what you know does not (necessarily) involve your autobiography (unless you’re writing your autobiography) or facts that you know (unless you’re writing non-fiction). (If you don’t know the facts about something, that’s what research is for, and you can always make stuff up if necessary.)
  Writing what you know involves emotions. We all know emotions. We’ve all felt happy, sad, angry, elated, jealous, bereaved, guilty, etc.
• World-building: the more time you spend creating your world and the flora and fauna, the towns and cities within it, the more you know that world. The more you know your world, the better you can include it in your story.
• Characters: the more time you spend getting to know your characters (eg using scribble chats) the more you know them. The more you know your characters, the better you can write them.

Free writing

We focused on world-building for our guided free-writing session this evening. We took a walk in one of our locations, answering the following questions:

1. What do you:
   • see?
   • hear?
   • taste?
   • smell?
   • touch?
2. How does it make you feel?

In our own time, we were encouraged to have each of our characters walk the same route separately, noting what each one noticed that no one else did, and how it makes them feel. For example, an architect might be looking at the buildings, whereas a botanist would be focused on the plants. The location may be familiar to one character, so they feel confident and happy, whereas it might be unfamiliar to another character, especially if it’s night-time, so they might feel scared and alert.

In our own time

We can repeat the exercise in different locations for different characters, and we’ll build up a picture of how each character would behave in each location they find themselves in. All of this informs our writing, and we can focus on story development as we write, instead of wondering what the location looks like and how the characters interact with it.

Readings

We had two people reading this evening, one of which really spoke to Caity: a poem about the fens from the point of view of an incomer. She was excited because she’s written a similar, but much shorter, poem about the fens1,2. She found a version of it on her phone, and read it out; it felt like a bond had been made.

Next meeting

We’ll next meet on 5 October 2022.

References

1. Caity 2018. Ely Writers’ Day 2018 at Ely Writers.
2. Pylons and Poplars