Monsters and Cricket by Claire Fayers

With my book launch rushing up, my husband away looking after his mother, and the weather so hot I haven't been sleeping, the last thing I wanted to do this week was go to writing group, but I'm really glad I did. 

First, with two book launches and a masters graduation to celebrate in the group, we had cake. Then we settled down to some serious fun writing with a pair of exercises I thought I'd share here in case anyone is in need of inspiration. Both of them could be done as solo activities, but I think they'll work far better in pairs or groups. 

Word Cricket 

You'll need pens and paper. One person to be the caller, armed with a book and a stopwatch. The caller opens their book to a random page and calls out the first word their gaze falls on. That's the starting word. The writers all write it down and continue writing. After a minute, the caller shouts out another random word. The writers must write that word down as the next work in whatever they're writing. No trying to lead up to it or work it in. It's like a cricket ball has been bowled at you and you must react without hesitation. Continue for as long as you like - seven or eight words seems a good length, then the caller reads out a final word, which must be the last word of the piece. 

Monsters

This exercise is based on the idea that monsters usually reflect people's fears - either individual fears or society's fears.

Split into pairs (we had three pairs and a three, which also worked). Take two to three minutes to tell your partner something you're afraid of - what don't you like about it, why don't you like it, how did the fear start and how do you react when confronted with the thing. Then swap. Then spend fifteen minutes or so writing a story using your partner's fear as inspiration.

Sometimes the stories will capture the visceral nature of fear but often they'll veer off into comedy. I confessed to my trio that I have a terrified hatred of mice and baked beans and I was 'treated' to a story about a mice falling into a pan of baked beans at a scout camp. 

We found that swapping fears like this meant we could tap into something personal, which helped bring our scenes to life, but without having to relive the trauma of our own fears.

Both exercises were great fun, and had surprising benefits - I've already used my scenes on the Planet of Lots of Spiders in my current middle grade sci-fi.

Have fun writing!

Claire Fayers

Welsh Giants, Ghosts and Goblins is out on August 1st from Firefly Press

https://fireflypress.co.uk/books/welsh-giants-ghosts-and-goblins/

How to make your brain solve a problem while you're away ... by Sophia Bennett

I've just booked our summer holiday. Yes! We're going to Devon for a few days, to the kind of place the Famous Five would have recognised - an area redolent of wreckers, sublimely beautiful with a hint of historic danger. I'm practically there already.

But first I have to work, to earn the price of a few nights of fish and chips, and maybe the odd massage if I'm very lucky ...

And on Thursday I'm running a workshop for research students at my local university hospital. They're working on life-saving ideas to treat cancer, and neonatal diseases and MRSA. I know I wouldn't be able to understand their research in detail, but I can help them write. I can also help them think about writing. And I thought today I'd share the exercise I most enjoyed doing when it was given to me, and I was a participant. It was given by Heather Dyer, at an event I did with the Royal Literary Fund. Of everything we did that day, it was the simplest and easiest to reproduce.

It goes like this.

We're going to do some free writing. You're going to spend a minute or two thinking of a problem that's on your mind at the moment. It might be something in your work in progress, or something in real life (that life that seems to fade into the background when the WIP is going really well). There. Are you thinking about it?

Great. Now we're going to write for three minutes. And the rule is simply this: you have to keep writing that whole time. We're after quantity, not quality. No pausing for thought, no pausing full stop. If you can't think what say then just write the last word you wrote down before your brain dried up and keep writing it until the thoughts come flowing back again. OK? Three minutes. And I want you to write about ...

What the solution to the problem isn't.

Got that? Three minutes. Go.

...
...
...

Done? Lovely.

Did your brain fight back? Mine did, when I did the exercise. It started off magnificently explaining a couple of solutions that would never work and then after about a minute it deliberately, mischievously decided to ignore the clear instruction and start to tell me what the solution to the problem was.

What to do? To obey the instruction to keep writing, which didn't give me time to work out how to tell my brain to behave, or to follow what it was telling me to write instead?

How you choose to write is up to you.

I loved that exercise. But that was just part one. Heather then told us to look through what we'd written and find two words that stood out, then spend a few seconds thinking about those words, then ... three more minutes of free-writing - whatever came to us, this time. And in those two exercises combined I solved three major stumbling blocks (can you solve a block? you know what I mean) about how to tackle the narration of my latest story idea.

It's a simple premise: our brains often like to solve problems subconsciously, when we're thinking about something else. Sometimes we just have to give them room to do that work, and grab onto the results and go with them when they come. I'm hoping that my days in Devon will give my brain a similar opportunity to go off and have fun while I stare out towards Burgh Island, so beloved of Agatha Christie, then come back to me with a series of problems solved.

We'll see what happens. And if it doesn't work this time, there's always the fish and chips.

Ideas in 60 Seconds by Claire Fayers

This blog post is dedicated to my mother-in-law. Who, on learning I was planning more books said, “I don’t know where she gets all these ideas from. I’d have to sit down and think really hard.”

I’m not entirely sure what people think authors do all day, but sitting down and thinking really hard is a large part of the job. And also walking about and thinking really hard. And doing the gardening and thinking really hard. And eating cake and thinking really hard.

I spent a most enjoyable time teaching a writing masterclass at the inaugural Pontypridd Childen’s Book Festival last Saturday. (A quick plug to Scott Evans who blogged the entire day.) I’ve been playing about with story prompts recently, so I led a series of 60 second exercises on making ideas.

I’m sure you all have your own favourite exercises (if you do, please add them to the comments) but here are mine.

1. The 60 second List

Set your timer for one minute and write down anything and everything you’re interested in. There doesn’t have to be any particular theme or pattern to it – in fact, a random collection may spark off more story ideas.

My list today included:

Ghosts

Music

Gardening

Cats

Baking

Buried treasure

A mysterious tree

A heist

2. The 60 second Premise

My husband bought me this little gem of a book for Christmas.

Inside, you'll find pages divided into strips which you can mix and match to create stories.

 

After playing with the strips for a while (all right, for hours, until my husband begged me to stop), I realised the pattern is always the same. The first strip sets when the story happens, the second strip gives you the main character and the third strip sets out what happens.

I’m really quite bad at writing complete premises, but I reckoned even I could manage a third of a premise.

And so...

Set a timer for one minute and write down as many ‘when’ phrases as you can.

Repeat with ‘who’.

Rpeat again with ‘what.’

Then mix and match and see how many new stories you can come up with!

3. The 60 Second Character

Ideally, your characters will drive your story forward with their choices and actions. For this to happen, they need a clear goal, strong motivation and plenty of obstacles to overcome.

Take one of the characters from exercise 2, give yourself another minute, and ask:

What do they want?

Why do they want it?

Why can’t they get it?

This proved the most challenging exercise for my class and we all agreed that it will take far more than one minute to come up with a believable character.

Still, the one minute rule was generally a good thing. The time limit made the task feel manageable – we can all concentrate for one minute. And because we only had a minute, there was no time for thinking really hard and rejecting every idea as not good enough. Anything and everything had to go down on the paper. The results might not be the world’s best literature, but they’re all starting points, and that’s what really matters.

Thanks once again to Ponty Book Festival for having me on Saturday. Here's to many more festivals, and many more story ideas.

Writing Exercises I have loved: Part 3 - by Ruth Hatfield

 Sometimes, the best writing exercises are the short ones! I often find that a major stumbling-block to sitting down to write anything is just the thought of what a huge task it is – even the shortest poems or stories are often huge in conception, and the task of boiling them down to a few words requires a great deal of scribbling and thinking (and starting and stopping and starting again). As for novels – it often makes my head ache just to think about how much my head aches when it’s holding the enormous monster that wants to become a whole book. So as with last month’s exercise, this one is aimed at making you see how a small amount of writing can get you very far in terms of satisfying the creative urge. What you do with the results is your own business!

I can’t remember where this exercise comes from, although it is certainly one I found in one of the many books on creative writing I’ve read over the years, so it belongs entirely to someone else (if anyone reading this knows who that is, please tell me and I’ll credit them). I love it, though, and it’s a joy to do when you feel that time is short.

Get a picture you like – from a book, the newspaper, a magazine, the internet, anywhere. Look at it for 2 minutes. Now finish these sentences:

I heard

I heard

I heard

I saw

I saw

I touched

I touched

I wondered

What you end up with is something like a cross between a poem and a sketch. Of course repeating the same beginnings to the sentences means you have to look at various elements of the picture rather than the first thing that springs to mind, and it’s a classic way of ensuring you use most of your senses (perhaps you could add ‘I smelled…’ and ‘I tasted…’, although that would definitely render the results a little more prosaic!). But what I like best about this exercise is the odd, slightly jarring nature of what you end up with. If you read your finished sentences out loud to yourself a few times (having hidden the original picture away first), the words become like threads of spider-silk, drifting off into a space you want to look further into. It’s a lovely way of hinting at something very large with just a few words.

Again, if you wrote (or know who wrote) that exercise, please let me know and I’ll give you/them full credit for it! It’s given me many moments of strange magic.

Writing Exercises I Have Loved: Part 2 - by Ruth Hatfield

A quick one today to cheer up drizzly January! This is one from a workshop I attended given by Olivia Laing, who wrote the wonderful ‘To The River’, which manages to be a nature walk, a soul search and an homage to Virginia Woolf all at the same time. Laing writes beautiful, expressive prose about the world around her – intricately descriptive but not overly rambling. 'To The River' is about a walk down the Ouse in Sussex, for the most part a reasonably well-travelled journey - how does she manage to write so freshly about a place that so many others have described before?

Go to the nearest window (Ok, so I did this exercise in a room in one of the Cambridge colleges and naturally the view was painfully beautiful, but don’t go further to pick one with a classically pretty view – just deal with what you’ve got to hand!).

Spend 5 minutes looking at the scene. Now spend 10 minutes describing it in writing (trying to write reasonably well and coherently).

Then walk away. Come back. Pick up your pen and spend 10 minutes describing the same scene, writing as badly as possible. Use all the adjectives you like, all the clichés, all the overblown or ill-fitting similies and metaphors. Repeat anything you like, as often as you like. Don’t censor yourself in any way – actively try to exaggerate and write badly.

Compare the two. Which one seems more full of life?

Obviously for me it was the second passage – really letting my self-censor go meant I had twice as much written, and had poked my pen into places I simply hadn’t seen when I was trying to persuade it to write elegant, studied prose. Perhaps it was because it was easier to knock aside the obvious points of the view with a few clichés and lists of adjectives, leaving me with spare time to look further into the landscape. But I’m sure there were other reasons, too.

We spend a lot of time trying to write ‘well’. But the point that this exercise made to me is that trying too hard can stifle us, sometimes catastrophically, to the point where we strip away our own thoughts and words because they seem inferior or clumsy. Then we compare the situations we’re writing about with others’ descriptions of similar situations, and often end up leaning on others’ writing. We might go so far as to use bald, overheard phrases in our descriptions, while suppressing words that leapt first to us as we looked out at the world through our own eyes.

Sometimes in writing, less is more. And sometimes more is more! I plan to spend drizzly January trying to let go, and seeing where I end up.

Happy writing!

Writing Exercises I Have Loved: Part 1 – by Ruth Hatfield

I’ve just had a 3 month break from blogging (many thanks again to Rachel Mcintyre, Claire Fayers and Jenny Alexander who stepped in with brilliant guest posts). In those three months I did no writing AT ALL. I really missed it, and the break made me stop dwelling on the things I find hard about writing and remember the things I absolutely love. I began to think about some of the writing exercises I’ve done in workshops over the past few years, and how they’ve helped me get to the heart of the things I want to write about. I’ll share a few here over the next few posts, for anyone who’s looking for a bit of creative stimulus.

The first exercise I can remember was one on a Children’s fiction course run by Julia Green and Lucy Christopher at Ty Newydd, the Writers’ Centre for Wales. I can’t remember which one of them did this exercise (they’re both brilliant at running workshops), but it took me back to a place I purposefully don’t try to remember or write about – the age slap bang in the middle of my teens. I can’t replicate the exact original exercise here because I can’t remember all the questions that were asked, but I’ve suggested a few of my own, and you can add more as you think of them.

It starts with a pair of shoes. We were asked to imagine a pair of shoes that we’d had as a child. Then we were asked a series of question about the shoes, to get a fuller description of them. What colour were they? What were they made of? What shape were they? Open or closed? What did they feel like under your fingertips?

Once we had a full description of the shoes, we were asked to widen the view a little. What clothes did you wear with them? Were those clothes for a specific purpose? What colour were they?

After the rest of the body was clothed, the emphasis moved to placing it in space and time. How old were you when you wore the shoes? Where did you wear them? What did you do when you wore them? What did you see around you when you wore them? What did you hear? What did you smell?

And the last stage of description brought the remembered person alive: What did you feel about the shoes? What emotions did you feel when you wore them? Were you warm or cold? What did you say when you wore them?

The exercises ended with a short time to remember an instance when you wore the shoes, and write your thoughts as the person inside those shoes, at that time.

For me, this exercise was very effective at delving into a bit of memory that I’d grown used to describing from the outside but preferred not to explore – I’d be surprised if that many fourteen-year-olds are really sunny people inside, but the angry whining and railing against the unfairness of the world that came back to me as I spoke from the heart of my fourteen-year-old self was a gentle reminder that I can’t always remember as well as I think I can what it was actually like to be a child, sometimes because I’ve purposefully hidden it away. This exercise was a brilliant way to excavating some of those hidden thoughts and feelings! I’ve tried it with various characters of mine, and it seems to work well with invented characters too (and is sometimes just as surprising).

A note about this one, if you want to try it – when you’re answering the questions, in order to get into the heart of whichever person you’re trying to dig up, you need to answer quickly and not give yourself time to think too much. I usually just write them out very clearly in a list, but recording yourself reading them out would probably work better.