• how do you start

and

• where do you start?

In fact, as we’ve seen, free writing is one way to get started. You start with a prompt (that I give you, or you find yourself – in a newspaper headline, for example, or an overheard phrase, or a single random word like ‘blue’)  and you just write to/ about that prompt for 5 minutes (or more if you can). You do this often and regularly. You read over what you’ve written and consider whether any of it can be used in some way (you like the sound of a word or phrase; you have a clear image of something you’d forgotten; you recognise a theme you’re interested in; you can hear the beginnings of a style or voice you didn’t know you had; there’s a place that keeps coming back to haunt you…etc.)

What you get from your free writing is entirely unpredictable – and personal.

But, whatever, free writing gets you writing.

To get you started on a story (any story) this week, I suggested that you think about your journey to this class: did something strange happen? Could it constitute a story? Now, of course ‘strange’ can be interpreted in various ways, and, if you really think about it, almost anything can be strange or unusual. And once you get the hang of it, you can come up with weird and wonderful happenings just by exaggerating something that did actually happen or by following something through that didn’t…). My example is this,

On the way to class this evening I parked my car as usual in my trusty parking spot – trusty because no one else would dare to park on such a steep slope.  I left the car in reverse – just in case.

As I was walking down, thinking about what I would say to you all,  I saw a woman coming towards me. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. She was looking the other way, so I looked at her profile more intently. Then, just as she turned her face fully towards mine I realised I was mistaken: I didn’t know her at all. I walked on but then I was stopped in my tracks by a shout,

“Loretta!”

I turned around. It was the woman, calling me.

“Excuse me, aren’t you Loretta? (she asked, in Italian of course)

“No, no, I’m not Loretta…”

“Aah…I’m so sorry…I was just convinced you…you look just like a colleague’s…I’m really so sorry…”

She was obviously acutely embarassed by now.

“Oh, don’t worry”, I said (also in Italian) “I just made the same mistake as you in fact! I thought you looked very familiar! Then I realised I didn’t know you at all…”

I don’t know if this made her feel better. She gave me a puzzled look and hurried on.

Strange, eh?

And could surely be developed into a story…eg. was one of us (them) lying? Why?

So, that’s an example of how to start (and now I guess I’ll have to challenge myself to transform that into a story. Okay, I’ll try. Watch this space.)

Next I wanted to consider, literally where to start. Even though stories seem to have beginnings, middles and ends, authors don’t alway choose to start telling the story at the beginning. And indeed, sometimes it’s really not clear what the beginning is.

For example, in the story I just told you I could have left out the bit about parking my car. Does it add anything to the story? Maybe some tension? Maybe it reveals something about character? But I could have started lower down (literally!) on the slope. Or I could have started a couple of years earlier when I first started thinking about teaching a course on the short story…if I decided that the fact of my teaching a class that evening was the real subject of the story…rather than mistaken identity.

Again, even once I have made a decision about what point the story starts, I can still make choices about what to tell the reader first – I don’t have to start telling my story at the beginning. So, in the same example, I might beging telling the story with:

Loretta was Diana’s best friend. She hadn’t seen or heard from her for five years. Nobody had.

Woah! That’s given me goose bumps –  had no idea that was going to happen – but I hope you see what I’m trying to say.

Anyway, here’s a handout Beginnings with some beginnings of short stories written by famous authors.

Read them through, think about what strategies they use to catch your interest. Think about where they choose to start the story.

What do you already know?

What do you already want to know more about?

Which of these extracts do you really like?

Which do you want to continue?

Can you borrow any strategies for your own writing?

1.What is a story?

2. What is a good story?

3. What is a short story?

Actually, none of these apparently simple questions has a straightforward answer – and literary academics have been ruminating on them for decades.

Let’s try and answer number one.  My class came up with …a narrative which has a beginning, middle and end (though not necessarily in that order)? Anyway, we realised the answer was very closely bound to question number two: what is a good story? Deciding whether or not a piece of writing or speaking is a story seems already to be a value judgment.

Think about something that has happened to you this week that might be a story – and jot down some notes/ ideas about this. Maybe the immediate and dramatic effects the closure of airports and air space due to volcanic dust from Iceland has had on your own personal lives and plans – or the everyday reality of doing the gardening. ‘This week I began growing vegetables for the first time…”  Is one story more worthy than the other? And what’s the difference between a story and an anecdote?

Consider what is really intriguing for you in the story you’ve chosen. In my class this week,  for example,  the story of the volcanic explosion highlighted different points of interest for each of us –  how we take for granted our freedom to move around, or our lack of respect for the impact on nature of our actions, or a salutary reminder that nature is a stronger force than we are, or the wonder of situations where strangers are suddenly thrown into intimacy together (in airports, hotels and taxis). Indeed, the volcano wasn’t really be the protagonist of this story – but a minor character.

Think about gardening (for example) – or whatever other everyday activity you’ve chosen to focus on as your ‘story’ – and consider that the seemingly dull details of everyday life can be the most compelling. Many classic short story writers (often men, interestingly) like Chekhov, Hemingway, Richard Yates – and women too of course like Katherine Mansfield – focus on the seeming trivia of domestic scenes: using the rhythm and routine of daily chores to enlarge our understanding of love, loneliness, and character (and so reflect back on our own lives and decisions and situations).

Next brainstorm the characteristics of a good story (what you personally would require from a story to consider it a good one). My class this week came up with a great list:

• detailed character descriptions
• descriptions of the surroundings
• interesting conversations
• page-turning quality
• thought-provoking content, keeping a touch of freshness but so that we feel we have lightly learnt something
• humour
• simplicity
• the writer shows empathy
• general lightness
• the inner dialogue of the characters – so that we the reader get to know secretsthat other characters are unaware of.

You can continue to expand on this list – and use it also when you’re reading stories to see if the ones you enjoy actually have these qualities. I found it interesting that no one in my class mentioned action or plot. I guess it seemed far too obvious. But in truth, I think we realised in our discussion about volcanoes, etc, that the story itself is often only the skeleton; the flesh is definitely in the telling..

So what do we mean by short?

Hemingway notoriously boasted he could write a complete short story in six words and came up with: ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ (This story has recently had a revival and may even have sparked the current trend in flash fiction.) Interesting that while for some of us Hemingway’s six word story could only be a tragedy (the baby died), for others it was wryly truthful (babies don’t wear shoes! or they get so many!) But we agreed that it is effective because it is suggestive - and somehow immediately conjures up a setting (I saw a big white wooden house along a road in a state like Vermont – with the shoes in a yard sale in the front garden), and characters (the grieving mother, perhaps, sitting on a rocker inside the door, peering out occasionally to see who is rummaging through her things) and a page-turning quality (will they ever get over it? how do they continue their lives?).

We looked at some other six word stories written by published authors in response to a request from The Guardian newspaper  (you can read them all here) and discussed which ones we liked. It’s interesting that already in such a short space you can almost define the genre of the story that’s being told, eg.

See that shadow? (It’s not yours.) Jim Crace.    Could be a comic thriller(!) or a thrilling comedy

“The Earth? We ate it yesterday.” Yann Martel. (science fiction, comedy);

Thought love must fade: but no. George Saunders. (literary fiction)

But are these really stories? What constitutes a story? Are there minimum requirements? And do these phrases meet them? Personally, I don’t think so. But certainly there is often just enough information in those six words to stimulate the reader to use their imagination and join up the dots – and that does indeed seem to be an essential element of a good short story.

If writing your own six word story feels daunting, here’s a way to get started. First try and re-write the following 7 word question in 6 words:

Did he jump or was he pushed?

Here are some possible re-writes:

He fell. He died. An accident?

He jumped. But she pushed him.

His wings broke. She pushed him.

Please do add your own 6 word stories in the comments box – it’s fun to read them!

From here it’s a short hop to fifty word stories. Spread the Word (a London-based organisation running creative writing courses and events)  held a competition for the best 50 word stories (or micro stories) and here are the winners’ entries. But there are loads of sites on the web that sponsor micro stories or flash fiction of different lengths. Do a search and check them out.

But in the meantime here are some exercises for you (and you can post your efforts/ thoughts below in the comment box if you like):

1. convert any of the 6 word stories from The Guardian’s competition into 50 word stories (you don’t have to be too precise – just use them for inspiration – it’s hard enough to do!). Do this as many times as you want.
2. convert any of the 50 word stories from the Spread the Word competition into 6 word stories. As many times as you want. This is a very different exercise from the one above. And probably harder.
3. Read The Cat In the Rain by Ernest Hemingway. Is this a story? Is this a good story? Why?

The house is above the Adriatic coastline between Venice and Trieste, in the village of Ceroglie (next to Malchina and above Sistiana) , 20 mins walk down to the beach and surrounded by woods – and with fabulous ozmizze and restaurants nearby.

The house – Casa Klarceva (a Slovenian name – I’ll write a post about the history of the house later)-  has been newly renovated by the fabulous Fabec brothers…

and has six well-appointed (though still cozily rustic) bedrooms (all of which can be twin if so desired) . Each room has its own ensuite bathroom with fantastic modern shower, etc. Importantly, there is also wheelchair access to all the rooms on the first floor (including a bedroom with a wheelchair accessible bathroom).There’s a lovely large communal kitchen/ dining room and another wonderful cosy room with an indoor fire pit.

The house is centered around a small courtyard and the landlords sell their own salami, cheese and wine at the house (though they don’t live onsite). All rooms have wifi access and there are writing tables in each room.

So, you see why I think it’s perfect! and…. (now I feel like Steve Jobs)… the price will be roughly 100€ per day per person and will include:

• accommodation
• all food (breakfast and lunch provided and self-serve; dinner – a variety of home-cooked in-house, trips to local restaurants and a meal out in Trieste)
• one 3-hour workshop per week day – and a double workshop slot on weekends

There will be various options (weekend only; non-residential, etc).

You can get all details and a programme for the next retreat (coming up soon..June 17th-21st 2010) by clicking here.

What’s the difference between a lawyer and a solictor?

Here are some answers skimmed from the net:

from answer bag:     http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/110213

Both solicitors and barristers are lawyers – professionals in the law. A barrister specialises in arguing your case in court. A solicitor specialises in drawing up paperwork such as contracts, conveyances, and wills. Solicitors are only allowed to represent you in the lowest courts – in higher courts you will need a barrister. And a barrister will be “instructed” by a solicitor, who has prepared all the facts from which the barrister will present your case. There are many more solicitors than barristers.

From yahoo answers  http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071205025616AAd9La1

Lawyer is a broad term that covers both solicitors and barristers. Unless you are in the USA where they dont have solicitors or barristers, and just one person doing all the jobs of Sol’s and B’s that they call a lawyer.

If you meant the difference between a solicitor and a barrister, a solicitor mainly deals with conveyancing (making sure all the legal stuff is good in the sale of land) drawing up contracts, writing wills etc. General legal stuff, Barristers on the other hand are considered the specialists, and the majority of their work is done in court, i.e. representing clients. If you think of it in comparison to the medical profession, a solicitor is like your General Practitioner, your legal doctor if you like. The barrister on the other hand is like the consultant. Specialises in one area and knows all you need to know about that one area.

Also, in Portuguese, the term saudade is unique in expressing a mixture of longing, desire, homesickness, sadness. The feeling is expressed well in the popular song-form fado. If you go to this clip, you’ll see what I mean…

This is certainly not traditional traditional fado – there was a much more natural clip on Youtube set in a dingy old bar in Lisbon but it was so dark you couldn’t see anything!  - but  I think her voice beautifully captures the blend of melancholy, beauty, longing, and increasing desperation…that is homesickness.

Opicina Writers is a space where I put up all course materials as we go along, so if you miss a class, you can find it there. I’ll also try and at least post my ‘lesson plan’ for each class (believe it or not, I do have one..) I will trial run my thoughts on how the sessions went, with a view maybe to posting them up on this public blog later. Maybe in the future, this will serve as a pilot run for an online course I might run, which people from all over the world can sign up to and join in our discussions.

Maybe. We’ll see.

So I’ve been looking around in Trieste and Opicina for alternatives.

The first  is La Casa Internazionale delle Donne in Vai Pisoni, almost opposite the Centro Giulia in Via Giulia (click on this link to see their website/ location, etc). You only have to look at our roll call on the Welcome page to see that we are absolutely the right group for this new cultural/social entity –  a small group consisting of more international women than us would be hard to find. And I hope we could have a mutually interesting relationship.

The room they’re offering is spacious (and initially set up for conferences with a projector, etc). It is a little sterile in atmosphere but we can brighten it up/ cosey it down with some rugs and cushions – and we can set up some tables in there (which will be a change from writing on your laps!). I can bring along my electric kettle and set us up with tea and coffee as usual.

Parking might be a problem? Though perhaps @ 7.30 it should be easing off.

Location generally is not centralissima but…easier than Opicina for most (if not all).

Second option is the wonderful Caffe San Marco with its long-standing tradition of literary links and cultural events. It is an enormous, character-filled cafe, near the centre of town on Via Battisti.

The manager there is very happy for us to reserve tables in a quiet corner on Tuesday evenings – we just need to obey the consumo obligatorio rule – everyone has to consume something – but he is happy if this is just a coffee (@ €2.50). They should bring the usual buckets and baskets of snacks to accompany any drinks ordered.

Downside here might be: noise and privacy. There is no self-contained room unfortunately. Manager assures me that Tuesday evenings are quiet and there isn’t usually any music (though if there is he thinks the caffe is big enough that you can find a quiet corner…). We could put up some screens around us if we want to give the idea that we are not to be disturbed..

“My name ‘Tonya’, is spelt with a ‘y’, not an ‘i’ and an ‘o’, not and ‘a’. It makes a difference to me if you spell it wrongly. It is not my name. Even though my father spelt it with an ‘i’ on my birth certificate. Apparently, my mum and dad were reading Dr Zhivago when they met. I am named after the Geraldine Chapman character in the film. This means that my husband is going to run off with Julie Christie but I prefer my name to Lara.”

Then I’ll add something about my surname ‘Blowers’ – and how it has been the source of many a humiliating nickname for my siblings and I, and how I am grateful now to be living in Italy where instead it is a rather interesting name, quite exotic-sounding, instead of plain rude and smirk-inducing. 

Then people will tell us what they want to about their own names.

This covers two or three bases.

First, the rather awkward getting-to-know-you round the circle kind of hesitant who am I? business that none of us enjoys very much – and in any case, very soon after we have all forgotten everything that was said and who said it. 

Second, it really does help you remember people’s names because such memorable information is attached to them.

Third, it encourages people to talk about themselves in a deep, contextual way, without having to say in the more stilted way, ‘I’m from Chad, I speak French, I have two daughters’. Instead, this enables you to say “My name —- means ‘born after twins’ but I wasn’t born after twins – my grandmother was, and when I was born, they said I was like my grandmother. And in my village, my tribe, we speak a language that is only in my tribe – there are 152 languages in my country. Each village has its own language.” or else to say “—-” is the name I tell people I’m called here. “——” is my real name in Russian – but it is completely different and in a different script. So I don’t mind if people say it wrongly because it has nothing to do with my name. I like it. I get a good idea of the person I am talking to, depending on the questions people have about my name.”

After some discussion, we will then go into a free write. (I will be putting up another post shortly describing what free writing is, but essentially it’s writing with no holes barred – letting go. Writing what comes into your head without worrying about grammar, spelling, punctuation, content. It’s turning off all the voices in your head – your mother’s, boyfriend’s, your own, that tell you ‘you can’t say that!’ Importantly, it’s a timed exercise. We start at 5 minutes – which can feel like a surprisingly long time when you’re not allowed to pause for thought.) The free write needs a starting point, a theme, an anchor phrase. For today, the phrase is …”His name was…” Off we go, five minutes starting from now.. 

What gets written might be terrible, boring, dull, rubbish (cross out as you see fit) but the exercise lubricates your writing hand, frees your mind of junk, actually gives you the pleasure of realising you can write, because you have just written!  and gets you in a very good place to knuckle down to some more (real?) writing. Sometimes (surprisingly often actually) it can throw up some real gems (a riff on Woolf’s wonderful phrase “diamonds in the dust heap”). In our evening session, one student found that the very first line and the last line she wrote made the beginning of a short story. If you’re reading this Katrina, let us know how you got on… 

Sometimes, I add to the melange of thoughtfulness by reading out some relevant passages from novels, or poems, or autobiographies, or from blogs, adverts, whatever comes to mind when I’m preparing my class. This week I found these wonderful passages:

From Sandra Cisneros The House on Mango Street

‘My Name’

In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A Muddy colour. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, sounds like sobbing.

It was my great-grandfather’s name and now it is mine. She was a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse – which is supposed to be bad luck if you’re born female – but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don’t like their women strong.

My great-grandmother. I would’ve liked to have known her, a wild horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn’t marry. Until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. Just like that, as if she were a fancy chandelier. That’s the way he did it.

And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn’t be all the things she wanted to be. Esperanza. I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window. 

At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tim and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver, not quite as thick as sister’s name – Magdalena – which is uglier than mine. Magdalena who at least can come home and become Nenny. But I am always Esperanza.

I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something like Zeze the X will do. 

Sandra Cisneros, The House On Mango Street (1984) New York: Random House, 1991, pp. 10-11

From Janet Frame’s autobiography ‘To The Is-Land’

There were the ancestors, then, given as mythical possessions – your great-grandmother, your great-grandfather, did this, was this, lived and died there and there – and the living parents, accumulating memories we had not shared. Then on 15 December 1920, a daughter, Myrtle was born, and on 20 April 1922, a son, Robert, or Bruddie; in 1923 another son, stillborn, unnamed, was buried; and on 28 August 1924, I was born, named Janet Paterson Frame, with ready-made parents and a sister and a brother who had already begun their store of experience, inaccessible to me except through their language and the record, always slightly different, of our mother and father, and as each member of the family was born, each, in a sense, with memories on loan, began to supply the individual furnishings of each Was-Land, each Is-Land, and the hopes and dreams of the Future.

[...]

I was delivered by Dr Emily Seideberg McKinnon at St Helens Hospital, Dunedin, where I was known as ‘the baby who was always hungry.’ I had a twin, which did not develop beyond a few weeks. Twins were hereditary in Mother’s family, and she would often quote the poem written by (I think) her grandmother, whose two sets of twins died in infancy: ‘Four little locks of gold.’ Mother’s memory of my birth alwys had two repeated references – her boast that I was delivered by the first woman medical graduate in New Zealand and her pride in the abundance of milk that enabled her to feed myself and other babies.

‘My milk was drawn off,’ she’d say, making a liberal giving motion toward and away from her ‘titties,’ in one of her many gestures that we, the ancestors ever alert beside us, assigned to the ‘French’ side of the family. With similar drama mother spoke of Dr Emily Seideberg McKinnon, which must have impressed me even during my first few days of being, for her lifelong repetition of names important to her – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Pember Reeves (The Passing of the Forest), Michael Joseph Savage – never failed to awaken a sense of magic. 

Janet Frame, To The Is-Land (1982). London: HarperCollins, 1993, pp. 13-14

From Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

[N.B. the inscription at the beginning of the novel reads:

The fathers may soar

And the children may know their names   ]

Macon Dead never knew how it came about – how his only son acquired the nickname that stuck in spite of his own refusal to use it or acknowledge it. It was a matter that concerned him a good deal, for the giving of names in his family was always surrounded by what he believed to be monumental foolishness. No one mentioned to him the incident out of which the nickname grew because he was a difficult man to approach – a hard man, with a manner so cool it dscouraged casual or spontanous conversation. Only Freddie the janitor took liberties with Macon Dead, liberties he purchased with the services he rendered, and Freddie was the last person on earth to tell him. So Macon Dead neither heard of nor visualized Ruth’s sudden terror, her awkward jump from the rocking chair, the boy’s fall broken by the tiny footstool, or Freddie’s amused, admiring summation of the situation.

Without knowing any of the details, however, he guessed, with the accuracy of a mind sharpened by hatred, that the name he heard schoolchildren call his son, the name he overheard the ragman use when he paid the boy three cents for a bundle of old clothes – he guessed that this name was not clean. Milkman. It certainly didn’t sound like the honest job of a dairyman, or bring to his mind cold bright cans standing on the back porch, glittering like captains on guard. It sounded dirty, intimate, and hot. He knew that wherever the name came from, it had something to do with his wife and was, like the emotion he always felt when thinking of her, coated with disgust. 

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon  (1977) London: Pan Books, 1989, pp.15-16

Then I’ll set some optional homework.

Homework for this session was to: 

a) write for (at least) 5 minutes everyday. Any time, any place, any topic (only not work-related). If you need a focus, write a diary entry everyday, or take a word or phrase from a newspaper and freewrite from that. You’ll think this is an easy task. But it’s not. You’ll be surprised how many of you don’t manage it. Every day.  Clearly it’s not finding the time that’s the problem (it’s only 5 minutes).

and/or

b) use today’s session as the starting point for some writing. Write a piece about ‘My name’ or ‘His name was..’ – or anything you like that has come to you from this writing practice.

c) see if you can find/ remember passages from novels/poems/autobiographies/wherever, that focus on names. Bring this to the next session/ e-mail it to the group. 

And that’s it. One session down. 

Let’s see what happens next week…

But, while the nature and the aims of the course remain intact, running courses here in Italy offers a new set of challenges. Finding the right room in the right place, understanding where and how to publicise the course; what times and days will suit both students and myself; how to cost it so that people will be encouraged to come (and I will be encouraged to continue!) …these are decisions all independent teachers must make. But the added challenge here is that so far, the groups are predominantly made up of non-native English speakers. And it is quite likely that, for these students,  the desire to improve their written and spoken English is more important than the desire to be freed into writing creatively. For mother-tongue English speakers, on the other hand, the emphasis is likely to be on the creativity of the language, and they might feel inhibited or frustrated in their attempts to explore and extemporise by the presence of so many others who do not have the easy fluency they do. 

Even though, on the surface, these two kinds of students might seem to have diammetrically opposed goals, in reality, they have a lot to offer each other. All writing is about communication, about finding the words to say what you want. Often, of course, it isn’t until you start writing something down that you discover what it is you want to say.

You need to know the rules before you can break them effectively. A poem might have no punctuation, or it might have a comma here, a capital letter there, but that’s not because creative writing means ignoring the technical side of language.  The (good) poet understands what punctuation is and what it does: that it’s a system of signals to the reader which tell the reader how the piece should be read (take a breath here, this line runs into the next, this word needs emphasis). It’s about being in control of the language rather than the language taking control of you.

When you don’t have the technical skills and experience, your expression is limited to a certain set of readers (ones that speak like you, write like you..) Once you’ve learnt the rules, your stage is much bigger, you can imitate and impersonate and really be freed into performing all sorts of roles (whether that be as the author of a scientific paper in a prestigious journal – using the kind of vocabulary and syntax you rarely encounter in everyday speech; or as the narrator of a first-person novel ” I met a moo cow coming down the road” ; or as a character in a play “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” ). Learning the rules doesn’t limit your expression; ansi learning the rules can expand your expression. 

On the other hand, an exercise like ‘free writing’  encourages you to forget spelling, punctuation and grammar. Free writing allows you to connect with your subconscious, to find the ‘diamonds in the dust heap’, to understand, through a process of brain storming and splurging, what is really important to you: your themes, your characters, your moods. It can also provide you with a strong sense of that so-elusive ‘writing voice’. Your style in these exercises, when freed from other constraints, can suddenly come into its own.

And this, practice , I believe, can only support and enrich your technical writing skills, your scientific papers, the need to impose order and structure, continuity and sense. The novel or the poem has never been a ‘random’ collection of word. Novels and poems require an immense ammount of concentration, control and organisation. 

So, here’s my conclusion for the day. You can not have the one (creativity) without the other (order). 

In practice, the presence of such different perspectives (there were 7 participants from 7 different countries in my morning group, including Northern Ireland, southern Ireland, Denmark, Russia, Taiwan, Italy and (myself) England) can only enrich a creative writing group.  There is such potential for a brand new bank of vocabulary to be introduced in the attempt to translate phrases, metaphors, scenes, ideas from one culture to another.

So far the odds seem to be in favour of stimulation rather than frustration.

I hope it stays that way.

So take a look around..if you look to the sidebar on the right ‘What’s on this site’, you’ll see all the static ‘pages’ that give details of courses – the same pages can be found as kind of index card headers at the top of this page. The ‘Home’ page will pop up with my latest blog entry. I’m going to be flagging up wordplay writing events specifically – and enthusing more generally about writing events I think will be of interest to you. I’m also going to write pieces about the ‘elements of fiction’, the nature of writing, my thoughts on the teaching process, etc. I’m hoping you’ll want to contribute to the site – write comments, get discussions going. I’ll be describing my courses and workshops as I go along, so if you’re signed up for any, you might very well want to check out what’s been said…