24th July Writing Burst!

Thanks to everyone who turned up for the Writing Burst last week. I think it's safe to say that it was a lot of fun, though producing something half decent under that sort of time pressure is a bit of a challenge! A warm welcome to Heather Richardson who joined us for the first time, and who has also successfully posted to the blog already!

We did some interesting exercises, I particularly enjoyed the 'object' exercise, where we had to write something inspired by the various objects brought in. We had an interesting array of inspirational devices including a dalek wine stopper, a home-made bookmark, a very funky mini-tool kit, a pocket compass, a card from sorrento, lip gloss, amongst other things. I have a poem I'm polishing up thanks to that exercise, which I'll hopefully share with you later in the week.

We followed up with an exercise from a fantastic book that Heather brought in, which involved filling in the blank in the following sentence:

"Seven days ago -------- now nobody will talk to me!"

Which generated some interesting responses!

The final exercise involved taking a piece of paper and folding it in two. On one side of the paper one person wrote 10 nouns in a row down the page. The paper was then passed over to another person, folded so you couldn't see the original list, and the second person wrote another set of 10 nouns in a row down the page. The paper was then opened out so the word combinations could be seen. The exercise then requires that you attempt to write something using the word combinations. So, we thought it'd be a great idea to throw some of these combinations out to the group and see what you do with them! There were five of us there, so I've picked one from each sheet, with a few bonus one's thrown in, because we really liked them! See what you can do with the following, and post the results on the site!

axe lips
door vomit
war stick
pan party
city hair
banana lace
basket vampire
shelf buttock
zip book
nest beauty (specially for Carol!)

Have fun, and I look forward to seeing the results!

Next meeting is on 28th August.