Island Writers has almost reached maximum capacity, and with the lazy days of summer behind us, soon we’ll have to freeze membership again. But that leaves many Isle of Wight writers still looking for support and encouragement from a group of enthusiastic writer friends. Non-members are welcome to join the Island Writers facebook group, but it’s not the same as meeting in person.
A series of themed, stand-alone workshops, open to non-members and members alike, offers opportunities to link up with other local writers, including people who want to get back to creative writing, and those with more experience.
As a trial run, I’ve arranged three Sunday afternoon workshops, which will be held at our home in Ryde. The content will be suitable for writers of any genre, and will include :
LIGHT & DARK: Sunday 16 OCT, 3pm to 5.30pm, £7.50
CHRISTMAS: Sunday 20 NOV, 3pm to 5.30pm, £7.50
TIME: Sunday 15 JAN, 3pm to 5.30pm, £7.50
We’ve had several enquiries about writing memoirs/autobiography, so next year, I will be leading a series of three Wednesday afternoon sessions in Ryde:
MEMOIR-WRITING: Wednesday 8, 15 and 22 FEB, 3pm to 5.30pm, £22.50 (for 3 sessions)
All of these will have limited spaces, so book your place now to avoid disappointment!
As it’s Boxing Day, I thought you’d all like a gift… an extra creative writing assignment! Yippee! And while we’re still feeling festive, I decided Cinderella was the ideal topic.
As far as writers are concerned, the Cinderella story is a wonderful starting point for short stories, romance novels, and even fantasy fiction like Harry Potter.
If you’re not in a particularly creative mood, give us a simple re-telling of the well-known fairy tale, or try it as a poem or play script: it’ll be interesting to compare different versions. You could even combine it with Steve’s writing challenge, and try to tell it in exactly 100 words (not including the title).
If you want to mix it up a bit, you might make the characters all woodland animals, change the ending so the handsome Prince falls in love with one of the ugly sisters, or have a gender-swap, with poor Chris who can’t go to the ball with his ugly step-brothers.
Or why not try a modern-day version, where Cinderella goes out clubbing, but her ride home leaves at twelve, or even a futuristic science fiction version, where the magic is replaced by science, and her outfit is set to dissolve on the dot of midnight?
Whichever you decide upon, remember the next Island Writers meeting is on Tuesday 4th Dec at 7pm-9pm – and unless the rules change, we’ll be back at Ryde Library (£2.50 a session)
Those of you who have been paying attention may have noticed that my daily NaNoWriMo updates have gone from a sprint to a jog to an uphill plod, and finally come to a breathless standstill. I’m pleased with the 6,000 words I managed to write, but I wasn’t sure where the book was going after that.
I’m not too disheartened. Writing a 50,000-word novel in a month is not easy, so instead, I’ve spent the rest of the month adding bits to existing projects and eating way too much chocolate! But it’s made me determined to prepare more effectively next time – perhaps I’ll try Camp NaNo next April.
In the meantime, we have an extra Tuesday in November, which means tomorrow (Tue 30 Nov) we will be Yelfing – social drinks and chat in Yelf’s Hotel, Ryde, 7pm onwards.
This also means we get an extra week to complete the latest Island Writers assignment: Breathless.
This could be about a person struggling to breathe due to unfitness or some form of strenuous exercise – both of which applied to me as I thought up the subject while rushing home for our last meeting!
‘Breathless’ might also be construed to mean ‘not breathing,’ either referring to a dead person or animal, or a creature which does not breathe – a statue, a toy or even an alien.
Alternatively, it might refer to a shocked gasp, or the ‘breathless hush’ as people hold their breath, expecting something amazing to happen, or waiting for the outcome of an important or potentially dangerous action.
Next meeting: Tue 7 Dec at our house in Ryde – use Contact page for more info.
Will I have finished my assignment by then? Don’t hold your breath!
The latest Island Writers assignment topic, Maps, may seem limiting at first. OK, we could write a story about someone who discovers an ancient pirate map, and goes off voyaging to seek the treasure. Although it’s fair to say that this scenario might not have the same freshness today as when Robert Louis Stephenson wrote Treasure Island in the 1880s, there may be a few twists left if we use our imaginations.
We’re not restricted to a particular period in history, for a start. Our story could be set in the Stone Age with a map drawn in the sand, or during Medieval times, the Victorian era, World War II, the 1970s, the present day, or even the future, with space explorers going beyond the mapped area of a planet into uncharted territory.
And the map doesn’t need to lead to treasure. The map might be to give directions for some other reason, be used for town planning, or be part of an orienteering exercise for soldiers or girl guides. Maybe it’s a team-building activity for an unwilling group of office colleagues, or a TV game show.
Examining an area more closely on a street-map, or comparing a historical map with a more recent one, might reveal a secret building or local feature such as a cave or old water-tower. Or the information shown might reveal a hitherto-unsuspected problem which could lead to a story for your characters.
Our map could be something different from the pirates’ treasure-chart or a standard Ordnance Survey map. It might show tunnels, or ley-lines, or rock strata, or the journeys of religious believers. Or perhaps it just shows places with funny names such as Fatt Bottom or Bald Knob.
If all else fails, for inspiration, try Googling, “Interesting Map Facts.” If you found geography lessons boring at school , you might not think there are any interesting facts about maps – but there certainly are!
NEXT ISLAND WRITERS MEETING:
Tuesday 19 October 2021 – for more details, use the Contact page.
Lockdown was quite a shock to the system. Almost overnight, it took us away from our jobs, distanced us from our families and friends, and cancelled most of our hobbies.
It wasn’t easy, but human nature is resilient. So, after a while, we got used to these tiresome social restrictions and created different patterns of living for ourselves. Some of us even preferred our new, relaxed lifestyles, chilling at home in our PJs instead of struggling through the rush hour, and spending more time with the kids, with a cast-iron excuse not to visit our annoying in-laws. As for our creative writing… well, much as we loved it, we had to put that on the back burner until we got the other stuff sorted out.
Now, we’re crawling back towards normality… but wait. Isn’t there something we’ve overlooked? Has our writing been simmering on the back burner for so long, that it’s almost boiled away? It’s become something we used to do, instead of something we do?
It’s time for action: time to do something positive to get our creative urge back.
For writers of memoirs or family history, an afternoon spent looking through old photographs or a visit to a place that has links with the past could be a spur to get writing again. For playwrights (failing a theatre trip), watching a film we haven’t seen before could start us off again, or watching an old favourite, but with a critical eye for its construction.
For short story writers and poets, being an active member of a writers’ group gives accountability, a reason to actually do some writing instead of just feeling guilty that we haven’t. Island Writers meets at our house in Ryde twice a month to do short writing exercises, share our work and keep ourselves on track, and we set a new (optional) topic every two weeks. The current topic is Badges, and the next meeting is Tuesday 5th October, 7pm-9pm.
NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is coming up in November – so for those of us who prefer to write novels, Nano Prep can help us get revved up and ready to write. It’s already started, but it’s not too late to catch up, or we can use it as guidance, but follow the steps at our own pace – the important thing is to get going.
Instead of tinkering around with an existing bit of writing, adding a word here and deleting a phrase there, let’s get started on a fresh piece. Any subject, any genre, any length. Try one of these:
A journal entry – what you’ve done so far today.
A story which starts, “The dragon was restless.”
A list of reasons why your neighbour is a pain.
A poem about cheese.
A description of one item in the room you’re in.
A memoir of something naughty you did as a child.
A piece of dialogue between a posh person and someone who works for them.
Whatever we decide, it’s vital to remember that all new writing is good. If we’re not happy with it, we can edit it later, but first, let’s get some new writing down on paper.
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!
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?
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!
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.
Well, it looks like we won’t be seeing each other any time soon, but perhaps this enforced isolation will give us more time for creative writing. According to Chantal, Shakespeare wrote King Lear during quarantine from the plague. Whether that’s true or not, let’s stick to it and not waste the opportunity!
Feeling stuck on our current assignment title: Sticky Stuff?
Okay, so, what things are sticky?
Sellotape, duct tape and glue, of course. Superglue is famous for sticking things you didn’t intend to stick together. Wallpaper paste is particularly hard for inexperienced decorators to use correctly, which can produce comic results. Perhaps you have a memory of using one of these in childhood, or doing DIY as an adult, which could spark a story or poem.
Then there are various foodstuffs: toffee, syrup, honey, treacle, bubble gum, even candy floss, marzipan or glace cherries, although many other foods can leave sticky fingers which could cause a problem as a basis for your story.
Looking at the natural world for inspiration, there are spider-webs, geckos’ feet, goosegrass, Venus flytraps, and various animals which cling to things, as limpets do, for example. One of these could be a good metaphor for a poem about human relationships.
Or perhaps you would prefer something awkward and hard to handle, metaphorically sticky – a sticky situation. Remember, your story or poem doesn’t have to be about sticky stuff – it only needs to include something sticky, or someone sticking something. If a character sticks a stamp on the crucial letter, or licks their sticky fingers after spreading marmalade on their morning toast, they can get on with whatever’s happening in the story without needing to work in a glue factory or be an amateur beekeeper.
I hope you’ll all give this assignment a try, and don’t assume there won’t be that dreaded moment when I ask, “What writing have you done in the last two weeks?” because I WILL be asking you on Facebook on 7 April, anyway – and it’s no good claiming you were away on holiday!
Stick with your writing – Island Writers will be back as soon as we can.
