I belong to two writing groups, one which meets fortnightly and one which meets monthly. Things have been somewhat disrupted over the past year so some of the proposed virtual get-togethers have gone slightly awry, but even so, I have written a lot of shorter pieces since last March. Now the fortnightly group has decided to collate our work into an anthology which is a grand idea. Even if no-one else is interested, it’s a very satisfying to have a collection of work from a group of friends. We’re working together to produce it and at the moment I’m receiving people’s work and putting them into what will be the first draft. However there has been a stumbling block… and it’s my own writing.
When we get a topic I duly think, then write, then share my story/review/article, which I also save into a file called unsurprisingly ‘short stories’. I went to the file to draw out the relevant pieces only to find that I have given them titles which do not necessarily refer to the topic. When the topic is ‘Wonder’, and I write ‘The Wonderstone’ it’s easy enough, but when the title is ‘Green’ and that is not on the list of topics, how do I work out where it belongs – especially since sometimes I stretch my imagination somewhat to write anything at all. I’m sure I will work it out in the end, but here is the list of suggestions that we took it in turns to choose:
- Royalty
- Death
- Afloat / sea / adrift
- Sky/Air
- Fire
- Earth
- A favourite piece of writing
- Driftwood
- Listening
- Impossible things
- Precipice
- Sea
- Wood
- Phobias
- Acquainted with the night
- Lost / found
There’s going to be one last section, for us to choose our own favourite pieces of writing which we wrote outside of our meetings. The next topics for writing about and then discussing is ‘Stuff’… well I have plenty of that in our untidy house!
Lois Elsden 