July 12th Session & July Writing Task

During our July session, Kuli and Nirmal talked us through the basics of life writing.

Life writing means writing about a real person or events, and falls broadly into two categories:

Autobiographical – writing about yourself

Biographical – writing about someone else

It doesn't have to be their whole life, as poems and short stories can be (auto)biographical. The point is that it's a real person and not a character the writer has made up.  

We examined some of the reasons which people might want to write about real events or people, such as:

-          Bringing a new, previously unknown perspective to events/a person

-          Telling the 'real' story of someone's life

-          Approaching someone's life with increased objectivity or subjectivity

-          Catharsis – a releasing mechanism

-          Helping others in a similar situation

-          Educating people on what it is like to live a certain way

-          Entertainment, if the life/events have been particularly funny or unusual

-          Leaving behind a record for future generations

-          Money or making a living.

And we discussed how the purpose of writing in this way will shape the writing.

Then we looked at autobiography in more detail.

As you are writing about yourself in autobiography, you have to remember that even though you know yourself well, the reader doesn’t! That means you have to treat yourself as a character. You don’t have to make anything up like you would if you were creating a character, but you do have to remember some of the key lessons we learned in our June session about effective characters.

-          Write about yourself heading for a goal

-          Be consistent in writing your reactions to situations

Also remember to write about yourself in a true-to-life way. You can leave things out, but don’t make things up about yourself or it won’t be genuine!

And don’t forget that even though this is autobiography, it still needs to be interesting for a reader, so make sure you give the writing the same attention you would a story – lots of description and creative word choices.

We then had a taster of biographical writing by doing an exercise where we wrote down a few sentences about a few people we know if real life to describe them to the group.

Biography is a lot different from autobiography because when writing about yourself you have the benefit of knowing what your feelings and thoughts are and how you react to situations. When writing about someone else, you need to know them very well. There are three main types of biography:

-          Writing about someone who you know well e.g. your mother

-          Writing about a living person who you will need to interview or spend time with to get to know

-          Writing about a dead person, who you will have to research using other texts and records

There are some similarities to autobiography though - there are some considerations we need to make:

-          Representing people fairly and realistically, not offending them, and not making things up (don't want any libel or slander cases!)

-          Keeping it interesting, as above - making sure there's progression, a storyline and description to keep the reader's interest. Keep the people involved consistent - you must know how they would have reacted to certain situations.

To practice the skills we’d discussed, we practiced writing our own obituaries! It sounds a bit morbid but is a really good way of listing all your achievements and notable points of your life. Some were a little more – ahem – optimistic than others but it was great practice.

We looked at how life writing has been used throughout the ages from the ancient times to the development of film technology, as people are always interested in stories about real people!

We also looked at some common components which influence  life writing:

·         a concern for ‘truth telling’

·         memory – insight into past, present, future

·         place

·         revelation and concealment – no life can be fully recounted

·         privileged ideas and perspectives

·         context – historical, political and cultural

·         mixture of fact and fiction

·         voice – sense of person

·         variety of text types: letters, newspaper articles, photographs etc

·         allusions to religion, art and literature

·         writing and reflection to understand connections between past, present and future

·         relationships – insight into connections between past, present and future

All of these need to be considered when starting an autobiographical piece, especially if you are planning on writing an autobiography/biography of a whole life, or life to date. Once you’ve identified them, this will give you the guidelines which you will write the story within. 

Writing Task:

This month’s writing task is a little different to usual. As next month we’re visiting the Wolverhampton Art Gallery to produce responses to the artwork there, we won’t be able to share any pieces of work.

However, in September we’re having a detailed feedback session, so please send either up to 500 words of prose, or up to 6 poems to Cherry, who will circulate these to the group. We will spend a month reading them and compiling feedback which will be shared when we meet in September.

June 14th Session & June Writing Task

For our June session, Roma talked to us about how to create effective characters in our writing, and the benefits of doing so.

She posed us some questions to get us started thinking about a character:

-          Where does your character live/where are they from?

-          How old is your character?

-          What are your character’s mannerisms?

-          What does your character look like?

-          What does your character do for a living?

-          How does your character deal with conflict and change?

-          What is your character’s goal or motivation in this story or a particular scene?

It’s important to bear these in mind when writing as it will influence how you write your character. If your character follows behavioural patterns in accordance with the traits you’ve given them, they will come across more believable.

e.g. a character’s age will usually indicate their maturity level and wisdom which will influence how they react to certain situations.

We then had an exercise to write about one of the above questions in detail to bring our character to life.

Then we did an exercise to create a detailed personality for a character. We each took a piece of paper with 12 lines and wrote the name and age of the character at the top. Then we passed it on to the next person who answered the next question and so on…

1. To whom does your character turn to for advice?
2. Write one word that your character would use to describe themselves.
3. Write one word other people would use to describe them.
4. Write about a frightening situation or moment from their childhood.
5. What is their best trait?
6. What is the first thing other people notice about them?
7. Describe an incident they’d rather forget.
8. Who is their best friend?
9. How do they express anger?
10. What is their weakness?
11. What is their relationship with food/body image?
12. What music do they like?

We ended up with some quite eccentric characters this way! Not everybody looked at the previous answers to line up a believable character but it was good fun to see how people’s minds worked together to create a character from nothing more than a name and age.

Next we looked at how to create villainous characters! We explored 3 examples – Voldemort from the Harry Potter series, Mr Hyde from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, and Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty. We discussed what made them effective villains.

-          Credibility – most villains are powerful, which allows them to cause problems for the protagonist, and also means they often have followers or minions to help with their evil deeds.

-          Believable motivation/goals – there must be a reason the character has decided to act in this way. What are their goals – power? Wealth? Revenge?

However, antagonists aren’t always ‘bad guys’. Sometimes they’re just opposing viewpoints to the protagonist. From their point of view, YOUR protagonist is THEIR antagonist.  A back story explaining their motivation and goals can make them more likeable, if you don’t want them to come across too villainous.

With this in mind, we created a brief back story for one of the following characters:

Ruby – a young socialite who seduces men for money

James – a teenage bully in a local school

Mark – a corporate boss who9 disrespects his workers and never show gratitude

Agnes – a mistress who is bitter and spiteful to her lover’s wife

This helped us to remember that antagonists are characters too, and that they should also have believable goals and characteristics, just like ‘good’ characters. Otherwise they will be one-dimensional and clichéd.

Thanks Roma for a very useful session!

Can you create a piece of writing using a character you’ve built up using these techniques? Bring it with you next session to share with the group.

Join us next month to learn about Life Writing, led by Kuli and Nirmal.

And don’t forget Kuli’s booklet, Rag Doll, is still available to order. J

Introducing 'Rag Doll' by Kuli Kohli

We are very proud to share with you the news that one of our members, Kuli Kohli, is introducing her new booklet, ‘Rag Doll.’ The booklet is a tantalising mix of poetry and prose, examining how it feels being an Asian woman living with cerebral palsy.

Kuli has a great track record of publication across a variety of magazines, anthologies and websites, and now brings some of her finest pieces together for this touching and provocative booklet.

 "Kuli Kohli’s poetry has come out of a long process of finding her voice and understanding her life and its imposed limits. She writes fluently in a variety of styles and forms and tells us a great deal about what it’s like to be an Asian woman with disabilities in modern Britain. It is by turns moving and funny. She should be an inspiration to us all." Simon Fletcher - Poet and publisher

 "Lovely poems to move the heart and mind with a rainbow of emotions." Surjit Dhami - Meditation Teacher and Consultant Editor of Universal Target Magazine

To order a copy of this fantastic piece for £3.95, please get in contact via Facebook or Twitter, or leave a comment below.

May 10th Session & May Writing Task

For our May session, our member Eileen led a lesson about how to write the ‘Poetry of Emotion.’

We started out with the basics; brainstorming as many emotions as we could. Sometimes it’s easy to think all emotive poetry is about love because there is so much of it around! But there are actually a lot of different emotions which a poet can use. The only problem is that once you’ve chosen an emotion to write about, how do you describe it?

We each chose an emotion and used it in an exercise where we asked the following questions:

-          What colour is the emotion?

-          What does it taste like?

-          What does it smell like?

-          What does it look like?

-          What does it sound like?

-          What does it feel like?

This really helped us get under the skin of our chosen emotion by using different senses to bring it to life. It can be difficult to assign a taste, smell or sound to an emotion!

Here’s an example:

Guilt is a lingering putrid yellow

that tastes like acid reflux.

It smells like an urban underpass on Sunday morning,

looks like a peeling carcass,

and sounds like a constant drone of insects.

It feels like dragging a rock, the frayed rope ribboning scars into your palms.

We’ve now got a starting point for an interesting poem about emotion!

For our next exercise, we looked at simile and metaphor.

A SIMILE is where you say something IS LIKE something else.

e.g. as green as grass, as dark as night, sharp like a knife

A METAPHOR is when you say something IS something else.

e.g. Her old hand was a withered leaf

Using these way of describing things, we tried to think of metaphors and similes for different emotions. Here’s some for guilt again, and also for love:

<Simile> Guilt feels like your conscience is caught in a trouser press.

Love is like honey being poured over your life.

<Metaphor> Guilt is woodworm; corrosive, picking holes in you, and weakening your structural integrity.

Love is honey being poured over your life.

Simile and metaphor are really good devices for making your reader understand exactly what you meant in your writing. Therefore they’re really useful when talking about emotion, because if you’re trying to describe an emotion to your reader, you should liken it to something they can relate to.

We tried to write a poem using metaphor and simile.

Serenity is undisturbed leaves on the forest floor,

blades of grass, warm underfoot,

and sinking into the sound of waves.

Serenity is a fluttering drape flashing views of a sunny day.

an untouched glass of milk, fresh from the fridge and smooth as an opal.

Serenity is walking into sunbeams, blinded but footsure,

alone in engulfing yellow light.

May Writing Task

Our writing task this month is to pick an emotion and produce a poem using either (or both) of the techniques we learned.

Three of our members' works at The Poetry Fence at Acton Scott!

If you happen to find yourself roaming around Shropshire, please visit the historic farm, Acton Scott, nestled in the natural beauty of an English countryside. And don't forget to pass by the Poetry Fence where three pieces of poem by our members Romalyn Ante, Cherry Doyle, and Kuli Kohli were featured hanging in a red-silk tie along the fence. 

 Click HERE to check those lovely pieces of poetry.

 Thank you to the poet in residence of Acton Scott, Jean Atkin, for featuring such lovely poetry! Visit the Acton Scott website HERE

:-)

Letters to Me: February Writing Task by Kali Ravel

Warning: Some strong language in this one!

Following the sessions we did on writing for children and writing exercises, I've been using the techniques we discussed to develop two of my characters. To this end, I found an exercise which consisted of a list of questions to answer, and began working through them for both characters. The final question, which I include below, was to write a letter to myself from the point of view of those characters.

My first character, Eloise Richards, is fifteen-years-old and lives with her Aunt Portia. Her life is reasonably idyllic, apart from a few things. She is home-schooled due to her issues with ADD and recurring nightmares, which prevent her from sleeping. She is also saddened by being separated from her parents; she was born as the result of an affair, and each of her parents has another, legitimate, daughter. Eloise was sent away in order to uncomplicate the situation.

Eloise lives in a universe very like ours, apart from the fact that certain people have special powers, including Eloise herself. If it sounds like X-Men, that's because I loved them when I was thirteen and first invented the character!

Mina Stafford, my second character, is markedly different to Eloise, and it was very interesting trying to write them both at the same time. Mina is in her mid-twenties. She was abused by her parents – sexually by her stepfather and emotionally by her mother. As an adult, she finally began to build a semi-healthy relationship with Leo, a Canadian con artist. When he died, she was unable to cope and slaughtered those who she felt were responsible before turning the gun on herself. Her letter to me is rather different from Eloise's.

A Letter from Eloise

Dear Ms Ravel,

Oh my god! Well, like, literally right?! You made me! You made my whole universe! Oh my god, this is such a big deal! Do you have magic powers? Can you make me fly?! Can you fly? I would fly, if I made the universe. Why didn't you just make everyone fly?

I really don't know what to say. I feel like I should ask you for something. Like, can you make the whole world peaceful, and make everyone immortal? I don't know how that would really work from like a space and resources point of view...can't you just like magically move people to other planets? Like with magic doors? And just make crops appear where they're supposed to so everyone can eat?

Can you make everyone not be ill any more? Can you make everyone happy? Can you make my parents be in love and make my sisters...well, maybe not never exist, because that's mean and I'm sure they like being alive, but, make them, like someone else's kids and someone else's sisters?

Can you take my nightmares away, and let me get some sleep? Can you make it so it's always a really nice spring day, with sunshine and light breezes, but not too shiny and not too breezy, and maybe a thunderstorm every so often to spark it up a bit? And, like, cure cancer? Will you cure cancer? And all those other horrible illnesses? Please?

Also, that flying thing. That would be awesome. But not wings, we'd all have to change our clothes so the wings would fit and it would just be so awkward.

Love

Eloise Richards

A Letter from Mina Stafford

Dear Ms Ravel,

Oh, I'm coming for you bitch. What kind of sick psycho are you, to do this to me?! You gave me parents who never loved me, a mother who didn't give a fuck what happened to me, and a stepfather who got his kicks from raping me! You gave me my Catholic beliefs, and now you're trying to take them away?! Is there even a God?! You're my goddamn creator, and you did this to me! You bitch! You took Leo! You gave me all that shit, then you gave me one person, just one person in the world who didn't ignore me or hurt me, and then you took him away! You took him away! He was good! He was a good man and he was mine and you took him AWAY!

Bring him back. You can do that. You made this world. Bring him back!

...I don't give a shit about “plausible narrative”. Those words are in my head because of you, aren't they?! I don't give a fuck how you do it, just bring him back!

You made me, and you made me a killer. I'm coming for you.

Mina Stafford

You can follow these links to read the character profiles for these two lovely ladies.

Read more of Kali’s work at her blog 'This is how it begins'.

April 12th Session & April Writing Task

This month we welcomed Jack Edwards, our guest speaker, who ran a session on Japanese short forms of poetry.

We started by learning about Haiku and how traditionally in English, they’re considered to be written in 3 lines, with 5 syllables in the first, 7 in the second and 5 in the third.

My storehouse burned down - (5)

now nothing stands between me (7)

and the moon above. (5)

Mizuata Masahide

We tried writing a Haiku in this format, which was unusual for people who were used to writing prose or long poems! Then we learned from Jack that the syllable count doesn’t matter too much, and what’s more important in Haiku is capturing a moment.  

Spring rain –

under trees

a crystal stream.

Basho

For a writing exercise, each of us picked a photo. Some people had a lake, a beach, or a city. We then wrote a Haiku for each season, based in the location shown in the photo. It really got us thinking! Having four Haiku meant we could link them into one longer poem.

After this, Jack got us all to write a Haiku about somewhere or something in Wolverhampton. He split us into groups and we linked all our Haiku together to make a poem which flowed. This is an example of Renga, which was a collaborative form of poetry used by the ancient Japanese. One person would start with a Haiku, and others would contribute verses to add onto the end, creating a long story.

Once we were all comfortable with Haiku, Jack taught us how to extend our Haiku into a Tanka, by adding two lines on the end which reflected on the initial 3 lines.

It was a very interesting session, and something very different to usual. It’s always enjoyable to learn new techniques, and we thank Jack for joining us.

April Writing Task

This month, our task is to write a Haiku based on something which happens during the month. We will share these at the next meeting.