February 2nd 2023 - First of many

I'm back home from an event organised by Scratch Books at the London Library. It was an event discussing short stories. In particular, short stories that appear in Scratch's second book Reverse Engineering II. Which is an anthology of stories that sit alongside interviews with the writers, deconstructing how the story came to be.It's a great little book. And there are 2 of them. So far.

At the event were Tessa Hadley, Wendy Erskine and Ben Okri in conversation with Alison MacLeod. Three very different writers. They all shared brilliant excerpts from their work and discussed the craft.

I had a fab night. I was apprehensive about going. I'm socially nervous at the best of times, especially in loud rooms where I need to make myself heard. Soft-spoken fellow that I am. But I met someone outside the door who I had a good chat with throughout the evening. Then I met some attendees of the Goldsmiths course I'm in which was great. I met the creator of Scratch Books who I'd been in contact with only via email before. I even had a brief chat with Wendy before I left. Pretty good I think. Even if I now need some time to recharge my social batteries - I think I did well.

I hope I can make these kinds of events a regular thing. I'm reminded of Austin Kleon's advice in his book 'Show Your Work'. Creativity rarely happens in isolation. The myth of the lone genius is dangerous. Writers, even though we do the majority of our work alone, I do believe need a network. A group of people who will share the same passions, debate their ideas, or just be the one you can get drunk with on occasion. These events I think present a great opportunity to find those people to build your creative network. Though I will continue until my dying day to hate the term... "networking".

January 21st 2023 - Preparing for next week's course

I'm on a 6-day streak with my "show up to my desk" task. The timing is good I think as it's already paying dividends.

I'm mainly doing preparatory work for the Goldsmiths course that starts Tuesday evening.

The advice was to:

1. Immerse yourself in stories (no problem there)

2. Journal (again, no issue between my daily journal and my exercise book)

3. Complete a writing task

The writing task was to pick a prompt and write something up to 1000 words.

The first one I picked from a long list was: "Write a 13-word story"

This took me back to an online seminar I attended last year run by Jon McGregor. He was talking about ways of filling the blank page, getting started and generating ideas. His seminar in particular was what kicked off my habit of keeping a writing exercise book where I just make observations, play games and write whatever to keep in practice.

One of the things he spoke about was the importance of games or puzzles. How they can restrict what you need to write down to the solving of a problem. A story in 13 words sounded just like this. It's a problem to be solved, so I started there and then worked on variations around that.

1. First I just tried to write a 13-word story, with no extra rules.

2. Then I took a game of Wordle and used the 4 words that came from that, trying to fit them into a 13-word story.

3. Then I tried to write a 13-word story using only 13-letter words.

4. Then I took a 13-word sentence from a news article and replaced all of the words with the ones that appeared 13 entries later in the dictionary.

5. Then I tried to write a sentence that started with a 1-letter word and then continued to add 1 letter until I finished with a 13-letter word.

Nothing I wrote was very long but I ended up having to think creatively for each variation of the exercise and I ended up with some lines which could act as prompts to further stories.

Another prompt I liked was to start a story with a line of dialogue. There was a line of dialogue I'd recorded from a writing exercise in the park ("Come onnnnn - we're gonna get stuck in this fuckin' mud") that I liked the idea of starting with so I continued to write with that.

It's at 456 words so far with a working title of 'Wordle Mud and Terry'.

Looking forward to Tuesday now.

January 16th 2023 - Back In The Habit

I restarted a habit this morning, something I tried to establish last year. To show up at my desk every morning.

I did well with a record of 85 days in a row last year. And it did eventually lead to me writing more.

My thinking is that in order to write successfully (for me anyway) I need to be in a good habit of doing it. If I don't make a habit out of it, instead I'll make a habit out of logging onto the PlayStation or binging Downton Abbey on Netflix.

Once I'm at my desk, I have a little sand timer which I flip over - I like using that as I've never taken the time to figure out how long the sand timer actually is - I think it's somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes.

Whilst I'm at the desk I follow Neil Gaiman's advice of either 1. doing nothing or 2. writing. Being given the ok to do nothing feels better as it takes the pressure off having to write.

Once the timer is up I mark the habit complete on my Streaks habit tracker on my watch. And I'm good to go.

Looking back over these posts I have mentioned some other habits such as staying at my desk for longer. Those have gone out the window in recent weeks so this will be the start of building them back up. And I do have my Goldsmiths course starting next week which should help get me writing again so it will be good to be back in the habit for that.