A great start to our new year of Creative Writing. Returning class members seemed pleased to be back together and we were very happy to welcome some new members to the class. There was time spent at the beginning with introductions, as well as talking about the way the class will work.
Hints:
Our writing discussion was around the importance of starting stories so as to grab the attention of the reader. It is best to start the story with action rather than descriptions of background etc.
Our challenge:
Everyone was asked to write about shoes. A description of their shoes, or a story about their shoes, or even a story about shoes. Great imagination was shown.
Our stories:
We had a goal to write something every day during the Christmas break – just a few sentences or a paragraph. For January the idea was to choose one of the paragraphs and turn it into a full story to share for our first class in 2023.
Many managed to write something several days. But it became more difficult to choose something from their efforts to turn into a story. And some wrote something totally different.
In the past we often had some commonality in theme. For example, one month we had a couple of people independently writing about the circus. With no common set of prompts, this was not expected this month. But one class member pointed out that many of them had ‘love’ in one form or another as part of the story – love by an animal for a human; love of people; love of home; love cannot be avoided.
We had a variation on “Jack and the Beanstalk”, where Jack entered a new world at the top of the stalk. No giant, but he became a writer of great stories when he returned to earth – perhaps we could use his magic beans to help our own story writing!
Prompts:
The prompts for our 13 March class are:
Joy Shirley
Hints:
Our writing discussion was around the importance of starting stories so as to grab the attention of the reader. It is best to start the story with action rather than descriptions of background etc.
Our challenge:
Everyone was asked to write about shoes. A description of their shoes, or a story about their shoes, or even a story about shoes. Great imagination was shown.
Our stories:
We had a goal to write something every day during the Christmas break – just a few sentences or a paragraph. For January the idea was to choose one of the paragraphs and turn it into a full story to share for our first class in 2023.
Many managed to write something several days. But it became more difficult to choose something from their efforts to turn into a story. And some wrote something totally different.
In the past we often had some commonality in theme. For example, one month we had a couple of people independently writing about the circus. With no common set of prompts, this was not expected this month. But one class member pointed out that many of them had ‘love’ in one form or another as part of the story – love by an animal for a human; love of people; love of home; love cannot be avoided.
We had a variation on “Jack and the Beanstalk”, where Jack entered a new world at the top of the stalk. No giant, but he became a writer of great stories when he returned to earth – perhaps we could use his magic beans to help our own story writing!
Prompts:
The prompts for our 13 March class are:
- Some tunes bring back the wrong kind of memories.
- I’d thought the carpet was clean until my face made close and painful contact.
- I was beginning to wonder if driving a car was something I should be doing with a cranky Dalmatian in the back seat.
Joy Shirley
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