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Creative writing assignment: Unsuitably Dressed

Ever had that dream where you show up somewhere in clothes that are totally wrong… or perhaps wearing none at all? Remember the scene in Bridget Jones’ Diary where the protagonist attends a party wearing a Bunny Girl costume… only, it isn’t a fancy dress party?

Being unsuitably dressed for an occasion is a fear shared by many. Why is it such a big deal?

Wearing inappropriate clothing marks us as an outsider – the person who didn’t understand the social rules.

Even the choice of a single accessory can be fraught with pitfalls for the socially unwary. Wearing an unsuitably loud tie, or even just one with stripes instead of spots, choosing a handbag in the wrong colour, or carefully matching all our accessories together too well perfectly – any of these mistakes can signal clearly that we don’t belong.

And it’s not just when trying to impress snooty people at posh formal gatherings that we need to worry. Lower down the social scale, buying the wrong brand of trainers, or wearing clothes that look too immaculately new, or picking a t-shirt with the wrong kind of slogan or band name can have exactly the same effect.

As a topic for creative writing, this visible display of being an outsider can be an excellent way to show (rather than tell) readers what a character is like. Do they swagger rebelliously into the ritzy restaurant, knowing their outfit will shock the boring people who try to fit others’ expectations? Or are they consumed with embarrassment as they slink in, hoping to go unnoticed?

If you prefer writing memoirs, perhaps you recall a wedding where someone turned up in a white dress, upsetting the bride? Or a day when you got in trouble for wearing yellow socks to school? What happened next?

The wrong clothes can be dangerous.

Many jobs have dress codes for good reason. Frilly skirts, trailing shoelaces or baggy clothing can get caught in factory machinery, or create hygiene hazards when working with food. Specialist footwear and headgear are needed on building sites to provide protection against horrific accidents.

Outside working hours, dangers can also come from inappropriate clothes for some leisure pursuits, particularly sports and physical activities such as rock-climbing and caving. Lack of protection against sudden changes in the weather can be a classic – and even fatal – rookie mistake.

These hazards could make a funny poem, or become plot points for a story, and often reveal character, too. What kind of a person knows a piece of clothing could be dangerous to wear, but risks it anyway for the sake of their appearance?

Personally, I solved these sartorial dilemmas by deciding several years ago that I will not attend any event or gathering where wearing jeans would not be appropriate. Not that I insist on wearing jeans, but if it’s too posh for jeans, I’m not going. (Actually, yes, I do insist on wearing jeans! Our wedding was the only exception).

Our next gathering is a social get together for drinkies at Yelf’s Hotel in Union Street, Ryde, on Tuesday 31 August, 7pm onwards. New writers are welcome to drop in for a spot of liquid encouragement!

To share your Unsuitably Dressed assignment or any other new writing, the next Island Writers meeting is at our house on Tuesday 7 September, 7pm-9pm. If you haven’t been before, contact Emily via the Island Writers Facebook group.

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Well, I blame Katie…

For all of us who haven’t done much creative writing lately, here’s a challenge.

It’s based on something Katie’s been doing during lockdown (so, yes, it’s all her fault). She found a daily writing prompt gave her more incentive to get some writing done. So, here’s the assignment for next time.

Write at least 50 words a day for two weeks – and here are the daily topics:

  • Wellies
  • Mountain
  • Pen
  • Cats
  • Rainbow
  • Autograph
  • Cave
  • Ringing
  • Bus
  • Blood
  • Scales
  • Beach
  • Unlucky
  • Wood

As always, the prompt is as flexible as you like. So, if the subject is ‘Cats,’ you could write about feline animals, but you might choose to use other meanings: the musical Cats, cat-o’-nine-tails whips, catamarans or catty people, for example.

And your writing could be a simple paragraph of description, or be developed into a poem, memoir, short story, play-script or any other format – you certainly don’t have to stop after 50 words if you can write more.

I’ll be putting daily reminders on the Island Writers Facebook group – let us know how you get on, even if you can’t make it to meetings!

NEXT MEETING: TUESDAY 17 AUGUST, 7pm-9pm at our house.

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Time for Island Writers to take flight again!

The time has come!

After waiting in vain for Ryde Library to let us back in, we’ve decided to start up Island Writers group meetings anyway – at our house, which is just around the corner from the library. If you don’t know the address or you have any questions about attending, use the Contact page, or join the Island Writers Facebook group.

As previously, we will be meeting on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of each month, from 7pm-9pm, starting on Tuesday 3rd August 2021. Yippee!

Don’t forget to bring your assignment: 20 Reasons Why I Haven’t Done Much Writing Lately. It seemed somehow appropriate to me!

Looking forward to seeing you all again soon.

FAQ

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Is creative writing only skin deep?

Scribbled down in a hurry, sometimes our attempts at creative writing can be… well, superficial. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. A short story or poem can be simple, lighthearted and entertaining; it doesn’t need to be imbued with deeply significant psychological resonance to be worth reading.

But our new assignment title, Skin, was chosen because it offers the opportunity to get under the surface of our characters and perhaps create something more subtle and nuanced.

In a literal sense, the skin is the body’s protective layer, of course, but it’s more than that. It has become a social signifier to other people, revealing information about our age, our ethnic background, our state of health, and sometimes our relationship status, social groupings and personal tastes.

We decorate it with cosmetics and tattoos, lighten it with bleach or darken it with sunbed sessions, scent it with perfumes and smooth it with oils. Usually these are attempts to subvert the information our skin signals to others: to look younger or healthier or more aggressive, or just different from (or the same as) other people. Why might your character want to achieve this?

Even without these efforts, the outer appearance people present – or try to present – in public can be a metaphorical protective ‘skin,’ very different from the emotions hidden underneath.

Skin is also the organ for our sense of touch: the most important way we interact with and explore our world.

It’s how we express love, anger, sympathy and a myriad other feelings in a physical way, and how we experience pleasure and pain, heat and cold, freedom and confinement.

A character in the James Bond film The World is Not Enough is unable to feel physical sensations at all. In the film, he’s depicted as super-powerful, unable to feel tiredness or suffer injury – but what would life really be like for someone who cannot sense anything through their skin?

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NaNoFinMo – swimming the wrong way?

NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, is the annual challenge to spend November writing a novel. But it tends to leave most of its participants realising that what they’ve written is, well, part of a novel, even if they’ve reached the target of 50,000 words written in one month. Even those who complete their novels still need to edit them. Now, NaNoFinMo has been created to encourage writers to get those part-novels finished, edited and ready for publication; it stands, of course for National Novel Finishing Month.

The NaNo website only allows targets to be set in words, not in chapters, pages, or other values, so I chose an arbitrary target of 1000 words a day. Pretty achievable, you might think, considering that the original challenge was to write 2000 words a day.

By Day 8, I had realised my mistake.

Editing is not like writing the first draft. Yes, I had extra words to write to complete the book, but their quantity wasn’t important: they had to be the best words, not the most words. I needed to feel free to delete words, sentences and paragraphs – maybe even entire chapters if necessary – without worrying about reaching a pre-assigned word count. An effective day’s editing could easily result in a negative word count figure, but that’s fine, if the finished book is the better for having cleared out the trash.

During NaNoWriMo, I had found that posting daily updates on the Island Writers Facebook page helped to encourage me to put in a full day’s effort, and I enjoyed choosing appropriate pictures from Pixabay to illustrate my mood or level of achievement. So I didn’t want to give up the idea of posting my targets during NaNoFinMo (which, to match the shark’s ‘Fin’ in the title, were all water-themed).

So, taking an average of my actual word counts from the first week, I cut my official target to 500 words a day, to try to keep myself on track. However, my unwritten target was to edit one chapter every two days, thus completing my 15-chapter novel in 30 days.

Did it work? Sad to say, no.

The first thing I did wrong was not planning and preparing properly. I made a last-minute decision, and I still had some important paperwork which took up my time, but needed to be sorted out urgently.

And then, a warm, sunny April was the wrong time of year to force myself to stay shut away indoors. In the early part of the month, I was too willing to let other distractions and responsibilities take preference. After all, I had plenty of time. There were so many jobs I needed to get done in the garden, and because of the fine weather, I made the decision to prioritise them.And then, on the 12th, the lockdown restrictions were partly relaxed, so we had several medical appointments and other social commitments.

More importantly, my revised target was still a numerical daily word target – still not the right kind of target. Nor was the unofficial chapter-every-two-days target helpful, as some of the chapters were almost complete, some needed rewriting, some were hardly started and one I decided to scrap entirely, while some of the editing involved rearranging the order of what I’d written, and breaking some parts up into different chapters.

Unfortunately, by simply not worrying about whether I managed to reach the word total, I had unwittingly removed my main motivator for finishing my book: my daily ‘reward’ to myself of choosing a photo from Pixabay to present each day’s update. Far from helping it all to go swimmingly, as I’d hoped, I was floating off in the wrong direction, and rewarding myself whether I’d worked hard at my editing or not.

What I should have done, I realise now, is set a target for the amount of time spent editing. And when I say, ‘editing,’ I don’t mean checking my emails, looking at cat pictures on Facebook, reading articles in Writing Magazine, making a sandwich, putting a wash in the machine, buying stuff on Ebay, mowing the lawn, typing up the agenda from a meeting, mending my chair because it’s a bit wobbly, watering my plants, answering questions on Quora, or emptying the recycling bin. Because, apparently, none of those improved my book at all. Who knew, right?

But I’m not downhearted.

During this month, I wrote over 9000 extra words for my novel, which is a lot more than I’d normally have achieved. I’ve also managed to tweak it and pummel it into a much more effective shape – it’s getting there!

Many thanks to Katie and the other members of the Island Writers Facebook group who have left supportive comments and ‘likes’ to encourage me on my NaNoFinMo journey.

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NaNoFinMo: finishing my novel in bite-size chunks

Lurking under the surface of my conscious thought, my unfinished novel from National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) last November has been making me feel thoroughly guilty. I wrote 50,000 words in one month! It was a huge effort, and yet I still have nothing to show for it.

But now, NaNoFinMo is giving me (I hope) the impetus to sort out the yarn from the spindrift and get my novel ready to self-publish. By setting myself an easy, bite-size target of just 1000 words a day, I can get my teeth into the job, and finish the editing in a snap by the end of this month.

Follow my progress on the Island Writers Facebook Group page.

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Writing of strangers and strange lands

Our latest Island Writers creative writing assignment takes its inspiration from the famous science fiction novel by Robert A Heinlein:

Stranger in a Strange Land.

It seems perfectly fair to borrow his title, considering Heinlein borrowed it in the first place, from the Book of Moses in the Bible.

Heinlein’s theme, an alien experiencing Earth as an alien world, still has plenty of scope for creative writing, as does the Biblical idea of journeying for hundreds of miles to find a new home. However, your assignment doesn’t have to be science fiction, or religious writing, although it can be.

Your ‘stranger’ may be much closer to home: an ordinary person who has come to an unfamiliar setting or lifestyle, perhaps a city slicker lost in the wilderness, someone facing the trials of their first day at college, a club or a new job, or some other social milieu where everyone else seems to know the rules.

The important thing is to allow your writing to express the universal experience of being an outsider. Whether you’re creating a short story, poem, personal memoir or opinion piece, fill it with the emotions which will resonate with every reader. We’ve all been that stranger… but will yours find acceptance or rejection?

If you’re trying to remember all the assignments in case you’ve missed one (or perhaps more than one!) here is a list of the most recent ones:

  • Sloth
  • Spooky Writing for Halloween
  • In the Basket
  • Stars and Stripes
  • Under the Microscope (not about Covid)
  • Sparkling
  • Emergency Situation
  • Stranger in a Strange Land
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Writing some NaNoWriMo magic

Every year, as November approaches, I have the same question in my mind: shall I have a try at NaNoWriMo this year? And I’ve decided that this year, with even fewer reasons to go out, is the perfect opportunity.

National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo to the initiated – takes place every November, and to ‘win,’ participants have 30 days to write 50,000 words of a novel. Planning the story and characters beforehand is allowed, but the official word count includes only what’s written during November.

With 30 days to reach the target, that’s a minimum of 1667 words a day. The hard part is deciding which words!

Impossible?

Not at all, as Island Writers member Yvie has proved – although it’s certainly not easy. She says one of her magic secrets for success was to set rewards for achieving 2000 words a day. Sounds good to me: any excuse for chocolate will do.

What I need now is a plot. Help! Thank goodness there are a couple of weeks before we start.

I’m reliably informed, by NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty’s book, No plot? No problem! that it doesn’t have to be a well-written, polished novel, or even a completed novel. Quality, in this challenge, is not nearly as important as quantity. The idea is to write at least 50,000 words of that daunting first draft, even if it’s a bit rough and ready, or indeed dire and pathetic. Which, believe me, is guaranteed in my case! Never mind: once NaNoWriMo is over, I can worry about polishing it up to a publishable standard.

I will post my daily progress on the Island Writers Facebook page – and I’m relying on you all to encourage me, cheer me on when I do well, and most importantly, mock me cruelly on any days when my result is under 2000 words, to shame me into increasing my efforts.

As you may know, I’m incurably competitive, so if anyone would like to join me, I’d welcome the challenge. Any takers? You can sign up in advance or at the last minute, on www.nanowrimo.org.

NaNoWriMo starts at the witching hour of midnight on Halloween, and ends at midnight on November 30th, and I will produce 50,000 words this time. Whether I will produce an enchanting novel is a different question – but it’ll be fun trying!

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Writing your way to freedom

Is your creativity feeling trapped? These long months of lockdown have left many of us struggling to write anything more challenging than a shopping list.

It’s not merely the physical restrictions of having to stay indoors, or events and clubs (including Island Writers meetings) being cancelled. The financial and practical issues of changes in business, job losses and working from home have affected almost everyone. Social distancing, wearing masks and being unable to invite friends and family to visit have left some people emotionally detached, trapped inside a mental bubble and often unable to express what’s wrong.

So, maybe it’s time to start planning our escape!

I had expected that we’d be allowed back to Ryde Library soon, but sadly it doesn’t look like that will be happening yet. Until that time, we’ll be returning to monthly Zoom meetings to keep in touch, and if the weather holds, we’ll try some mini-meetings in our garden – contact me if you’re interested.

No doubt you are all longing for our next assignment – oh, yes, you are! – so our subject is to write about someone or something which is trapped and wants to escape.

Your main character could be a person or an animal, of course, but there are other possibilities – even a Triffid-style plant.

Perhaps your trapped creature is a ghost or spirit, or you might prefer to write about a more abstract thing such as a snowflake escaping from a cloud, or water trapped behind a dam.

Whether your writing is a sorrowful, reflective piece about the trapped creature’s feelings or an action-packed escape from danger is up to you. Or maybe your character is only trapped temporarily and it’s a humorous situation, causing embarrassment rather than mortal peril.

Your assignment can be a story, memoir, poem or play-script, or you may like to experiment with another format such as a sequence of letters or diary entries – whatever you feel is appropriate to the subject matter.

Come and share your assignment at the next Island Writers Zoom meeting on Tuesday 15th September, 7.30pm – watch your email inbox or Facebook Messenger for an invitation.

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Creating significant writing

Our current writing assignment is: THAT SEEMS SIGNIFICANT. So, what are we to do with it it?

We have a tendency to look for significance in everyday things found in nature. The shape of a leaf, an unusual-coloured pebble, or a well-timed crash of thunder, could be taken as a good or bad sign, giving an answer to a problem for your story character. Or if you’d rather write a memoir, perhaps you have a memory of finding something significant which helped you to make a decision?

We see ‘faces’ in random objects, from potatoes to buildings – a phenomenon called pareidolia – and many people give them such significance that they choose to buy things or reject them depending on whether they are friendly-looking or scary. This attitude could create a good opportunity for conflict between two story characters – but is it foolish superstition, or are they right to trust their gut instincts?

We assign the quality of being ‘lucky’ to the socks we were wearing when we scored that winning goal, or the bracelet we chose when we got that brilliant job offer. A character having to manage without the confidence of these items can be believed to prove or disprove whether they’re really significant. Then we have lucky or unlucky numbers, lucky colours… the Daily Telegraph’s spoof horoscope column even had such things as “lucky biscuit: custard cream.” A decision based on a horoscope column’s ‘lucky colour’ or the decision to buy the house at No. 13 could be the inciting incident to start your story, or an idea for a poem.

For many people, the search for significance is what life’s all about. But we may be deluding ourselves. Perhaps life is, as Macbeth described it, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” And maybe the significance in your writing is that nothing is actually significant.

If you have nothing to say on the subject of significance, feel free to take it as a sign that you should pick another subject and write about that instead!

Our next Zoom meeting will be Tuesday 2nd June, 7pm. Watch your inbox for the link!