Temptation
Thus titled because that dastardly sun keeps taunting me with its presence, only to disappear under a rain cloud.
If you live on the edge of Dartmoor like me, then maybe this resonates with you. It’s like a yoyo of emotions connected to this weather. Standard for springtime but still, after what feels like 7,104 days of solid rain, I was hoping for at least one full day of sunshine.
It would appear that I have started this post with a cliché - I’m British and I’m writing about the weather. I’ll try to be more creative for the remainder.
Becky and I met again last week for a swift but always enjoyable writing session. Life is most definitely traveling in the fast lane at the moment hence it taking me a week to write it up.
We had less time available, but we had to start with the usual chit chat, sharing our latest endeavours, dog stories (Becky has two lovely sight hounds, one young and cheeky), teenage dramas (our thirteen year old girls are besties) and other life updates (sometimes a little husband moaning thrown in for good measure. We love them really).
Last Line Triggers
Eventually knuckling down, with daffodils joining us at the table, we started with Last Line Triggers. Geraghty tells us that starting with the last line can often be a great way to write a story, ensuring it gets finished rather than finding itself languising somewhere in the middle, unsure of where its heading.
She gives us a selection of last lines from published books (without giving us the titles, in case we’ve read them and we find we can only think of the story lines in the book). She asks us to use the lines as triggers, either
for an ending
for the opening scene to a flashback story to which you can return at a later date.
As usual, the clock is set for five minutes and as always, our results were wildly different.
What If?
Geraghty starts by telling us that the two most frequent questions she gets asked in writers’ workshops are:
How can I develop ideas into stories?
How can I write an ending that works?
She goes on to say that even if it seems that the questions are unrelated, they are, in fact, “inextricably linked”, because the beginning of every story contains - or should contain - the seed of its end. In other words, if you’re stuck for an ending, the bid that needs fixing usually occurs much earlier.
She goes into much more detail than this, but that’s the jist of it.
We’re then asked to take a dramatic dsituation, maybe one we’ve read about in the news, and use divergent thinking questions such as
What if?
Support?
and turn it into fiction.
We approached this differently, in that I wrote as many sentences as I could in five minutes, whereas Becky focussed on one sentence and expanded the story from there, asking divergent questions throughout the same storyline.
And that’s all we had time for.
Until next month, folks.