It’s writing group the day after tomorrow and we have an intriguing prompt in the sense that it’s very open, except we have to try and write something different or write differently from usual. We have done similar things before -once we had to write something, print it without our names, randomly pick a piece, read it aloud and see if we could guess whose it was. In almost every case we knew who had written it, even though we’d tried to change our style and our usual way of writing! Another time we had to choose a genre that was different from normal – I can’t now remember what I wrote, but I think we all remember the story Hamish MacNeil wrote – we were stunned to silence and then clamoured to know what happened next!
Our challenge for Wednesday is to “write something such as fantasy, other worldly, sci-fi, historical, etc.” I’ve mentioned so often that I try and challenge myself with my writing – but it’s usually from an unusual prompt. Maybe I should challenge myself with different genres as well. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, pondering on what I might write. I’m not familiar enough with fantasy, although when I googled fantasy writing I find that I have read ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, the first book of ‘Game of Thrones’, absolutely adored ‘Piranesi’, couldn’t get into ‘The Night Circus’ at all, and have been recommended Robin Hobb, an author read by Hamish MacNeil. It strikes me it wouldn’t be hard to write a terrible fantasy story, but really tricky to write a good one! I used to read a lot of science fiction when I was quite young through to being a teenager and beyond, but haven’t read any in recent years. The only historical thing I have ever written was a very short story about a Saxon man whose family had been murdered by the Normans attacking a couple of knights who he came across. So…
So I was dithering, flirting with the various different and rather feeble ideas I had, when I came across a poem by Joseph Fasano, an American poet and novelist I had never heard of before. It’s called ‘The Figure’ and you can Google it to find it – it’s from a book called ‘Inheritance’ published over ten years ago in 2014 when he was only thirty-two years old. So now I have the idea, but yet to write the story. I have to mention it’s not based on the poem because it was already in my mind, and it is only similar in one particular way – someone looking through a window.
No doubt I’ll report back on our jolly get together and give you an idea of the stories the others share on Wednesday.
Lois Elsden 