"I have not used any of these, just products I have seen are available:"  Joy
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Scrivener:

Link to Scrivener website - ​https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview

A Free alternative to Scrivener
https://crawfordwriting.wordpress.com/2016/09/19/free-scrivener-alternatives

​Welcome to a new year of creative writing.  It is great to see new members join us this year.  It will be interesting to have some new ideas and see some different approaches to our writing.  
 
A couple of administrative issues first.  My main method of contact will be group email.  It is not practical to keep in contact with each person individually.  But I am always happy to hear from you if you want to give me a call, or send me an email.  I am hoping that I have entered your email addresses accurately.  It may take a day or two to make sure all is correct – I am tempted to say to let me know if you do not receive this email!  More seriously, for this first email I will be setting the delivery and read receipt options so I can see who has not seen the email so I can follow up.
 
Now for the most important thing.  Creative Writing is a 'guided self-help' creative writing session.  Each month we provide a prompt for a subject to write about.  This can be a starting sentence, a topic/s, or perhaps a challenge.  At the session we then share our writing and seek helpful feedback.  So remember, I will not be teaching you around creative writing, but jointly we will come up with a topic or topics to write about for the month.  The idea is to develop our imagination and writing experience in producing a piece of writing.  The style that you choose could be anything that you are comfortable with.  This is not memoir writing, but all our experiences will impact on what and how we write, so an element of life is likely to find its way in at times; sometimes it will be fiction. 
 
When we meet, we will share our efforts, and then invite comments.  I could provide some specific questions, but there are a range of feedback options, and you may have specific issues you want help with:

• general comments as to the reactions from the group
• ideas as to how to start the piece of writing to grab the reader’s interest
• ideas as to how to round off the writing
• solutions to a block as to how proceed
• anything else that is bothering you
• And if no-one has a specific question to ask the group, I will have some questions – either for the group or the writer!

 
At the last Creative Writing session in 2019, we came up with some ideas for our February session:

1. The first was to bring along some possible prompts for our 2020 classes.  This contribution will make it possible for me to vary the topics more widely, rather than the ones that I find.

 

1. The second task was to write a piece from the Australian Writers Centre Furious Fiction competition for February.  As part of this, you should also subscribe to the Australian Writers Centre weekly newsletter – an informative read, even if it does include marketing for their many courses.  The links are:

https://www.writerscentre.com.au/  and  https://www.writerscentre.com.au/furious-fiction/.  It will just be interesting if we can all write something for February to show how different the entries can be.  Of course it is not compulsory to submit your writing to the competition, but there is nothing stopping you from doing so either.  And have a look at the previous winning and short listed entries – the December entry was interesting.
 
I don’t want to scare off our new members asking for you to bring something along.  It might be a bit difficult at the beginning of your writing experience if you have not written much in the past.  It was to give us some ideas to discuss in our first session, as well as some encouragement to keep writing over the Christmas break. 
 
There are a number of sources of information on the web.  I have attached a document providing details of just a small selection.  Looking at these might give you some hints for writing, as well as details of courses that are available. 
 
Our first session is on Monday 10 February at 2:00pm in the U3A meeting room.  I am looking forward to seeing you, meeting our new members, and starting to share our writing endeavours.
 
Joy Shirley
0417 065 351