So, what’s new? Nothing apparently as once again I’m scratching my head and wracking my brains, trying to flex my writing muscles and create something for the group tomorrow. It’s exactly the same as when I had homework at school, or assignments at college, and just about everything else along those lines – I’d fool myself into thinking I would get the task done in plenty of time which would allow for revision, rewriting, polishing and printing. And you know what? The evening/night/morning before I would be there, scribbling away. It’s writing group tomorrow.
Usually we have a theme or topic, sometimes a title, sometimes a different challenge – last time we had to print our pieces anonymously and pass them around for someone else to read out to the group. We had to try and identify the writer just on what had been written – we know each other so well we mostly managed that. Tomorrow our challenge is to write one thousand words, exactly, and to write something in a genre we’ve not written in before.
I looked up a list of genres and there were some I straight-off knew would be impossible for me. I had to look up fabulation to check I’d never written any without realising (a style similar to magical realism, which do not fit into the traditional categories of realism) It would take a lot of research to write nautical fiction, meta-fiction and meta-parody, or westerns, and now I don’t have the time. There are other genres listed which I would like to explore but would need to do a great deal more thinking – which I could have done if I had written my piece earlier. An idea which tickled my imagination is pastoral and at some point I might write about my mum and her sister who lived in a very rural area in the early 1930’s .
I’m making no progress, having been slightly distracted by watching a neighbouring cat who, having sat on our garden wall, staring at something on the ground, jumped onto the water butt and then onto a raised bed. S/he stalked around, glaring, then vanished, no doubt to climb over the front gate. Now s/he’s back, causing great alarm to a blackbird. Cat-watching isn’t going to write my piece for tomorrow. I will report back on what I eventually write, all 1000 words of it.
Lois Elsden 