Category archives: Uncategorised

A couple of exercises in showing and telling this week. This is a very famous exercise in descriptive writing, or showing not telling, devised by the American novelist and teacher John Gardner. It appears in his book The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (1991):Describe a barn as seen by a man whose son […]

Terrible weather last Sunday, so only three people turned up. As a result, we are going to repeat the “notebook story” exercise so everybody can join in. Remember, it doesn’t have to be a complete story: it can be a fragment, a poem, a piece of memoir, a scene from a play or anything you […]

Next week we’ll do the second half of the notebook exercise. Make some notes this week or bring some you have made before. The notes can be anything you like or think might be useful. All our notebooks will be different.  Then I want you to make something based on one or more notebook entries: […]

This week we are going to try the Wikipedia thing I found on the internet somewhere. It means using a random Wikipedia entry as a prompt. If you want to try it yourself, go to any Wikipedia page in English and click the “random article” link on the left-hand side of the screen under the […]

This week, we are going to use as our prompt the word “eleutheromania”. It means “a mania or frantic zeal for freedom” but by all means look up other definitions if it helps.  The idea is to use the word as your title, your theme or to quote it in the story. Write about 600-800 […]

For our meeting on January 19th, we thought we would take a leaf from Stephen King.  He famously does not plot in advance. He takes a situation, develops some characters and then lets the characters decide what happens. You can read more about this in his book ‘On Writing’, which is well worth £10.99 of […]

This Sunday we are going to try writing a story in the second person. That means that instead of your central character being referred to as “I” or “he/she” you use “you”. The prompt is “You can’t be serious”. This does not have to be the first line or indeed used at all in the […]

This week we are going to do pitching or a letter to an agent (it’s much the same). You can either base it on a big project you are working on, or one you would like to work on, or even one someone else has done (a famous book) . I want you to bring:  […]

This week we are going to do an exercise I call “reverses polarity”. The idea is to take a characteristic of yourself and write a story in first person in which that characteristic is reversed. For instance, if you are a man, write as a woman; if you are white, write as if you are […]

This week we are writing stories in the present tense. Here are some useful links: https://theeditorsblog.net/2012/01/31/narrative-tense-right-now-or-way-back-then/ https://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2007/11/present-tense-s.html https://www.writers-online.co.uk/how-to-write/creative-writing/writing-in-the-present-tense-the-good-and-the-bad/ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/21/rise-of-the-present-tense-in-fiction-hilary-mantel https://www.novel-writing-help.com/past-tense.html Some famous books were written in present tense: Bleak House (mostly), Clarissa, All Quiet on the Western Front, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Room, Bright Lights Big City, Wolf Hall, Rabbit Run, The Girl […]