I’ve got a big writing challenge coming up, but as usual my procrastination has somewhat sabotaged it. It’s the Three Peaks Writing Challenge which involves undertaking three tasks on Saturday – you’re supposed to get sponsorship from friends and relatives to complete three separate tasks, emailed to you one by one, and write three thousand – yes, 3,000 words on each within the allotted time. I thought it would be something which might help me to concentrate and focus on my writing as I seem to have been somewhat slack recently, plus raising money for a good cause chosen by me.
So, I’ve been thinking about this, as you can imagine, with no idea what the challenges might consist of, but determining to do the best I can. I have however, fallen down on one specific part already – I haven’t got my act together and asked friends etc to sponsor me. Bother. Oh well, I will make a donation and husband will add to it, and resolve that if its repeated next year I will pull my socks up.
I have been attacking my own self-set writing challenge from a list of twenty randomly generated words, and I’ve just about completed the seventh. I haven’t set a time limit on this but, having started in September, I have reached #7 – ‘Heat‘. I’m writing about the time I spent camping in the south of France with two friends, about waking up in a tent and it being so hot even first thing in the morning. It’s part memory and part imagination – there isn’t anything like a plot, it’s more like a snapshot of a past adventure.
The first word on the list was ‘last‘, and I wrote a purely imaginary story, inspired by the time I was a student, sharing a flat. I imagined a group of young people going out at the end of term, and one of them thinking about it being the last they would be together. ‘Donkey‘, the next word on my list set me thinking about donkey stoning, how people in past times would clean their doorsteps and window sills with a donkey stone, a scouring block made from cement and pulverised stone. ‘Spiffy‘ had me struggling, but I eventually had it for a rather mean nickname of an impoverished lad away at university. ‘Lumber‘ had me stuck, but then I thought of lumber room, and I went back to my story about a young girl called Peggy was staying with her grandma. She was helping granny tidy the lumber room and found a wonderful story book on a hidden bookshelf.
It wasn’t deliberate, but most of my inspirations seemed to hark back to my time as a student in Manchester, because the next story, ‘taboo’, was set in an imaginary disco of that name. It was inspired by a time I went to a disco and saw two rather exotic people dancing together – the floor virtually cleared as everyone stood back to watch them. ‘Root’ set me thinking about my own roots – Cambridge born and bred, until I moved to the west country when I was sixteen, and then on to Manchester two years later.
The next word is ‘carriage‘ and I’ve not even thought about that yet as I’m still working on ‘heat, however, I don’t think it will be as much as a struggle as #9 will be – ‘needless‘!
Lois Elsden 