Waterstones Creative Writing Group

I went to a new creative writing group that was held in Truro's Waterstones store last night.

I didn't know what to expect, although I was sure there would be a few people that were part of the NanoWriMo competition there, and I was right. It was great to see some of the old faces again, and even better to see that they were a lot more relaxed than during the relentless task of writing 50,000 words each!

The last time I went to a writing group, it was one held in Helston Library a few years ago. It was at the time when I had first come up with the idea of my Mother Nature story. I wanted my new story to have a Hollywood kind of feel to it, but as my luck would have it, I was set upon by an old Pagan who wanted to try and change my mind in the way I was going to write it - needless to say she didn't have any influence and I only went to that group a couple of times.

Sarah, the ML for the NanoWriMo and one other ran the group last night. It was good fun, they gave us silly tasks, like we've got ten minutes to write something about 'Inspiration' and then read it out to the rest of the class. There was a good sixteen people there and a couple I'm looking forward to chatting to if I go again.

I'm not totally sure if it's my cup of tea. I spend hours thinking of what I am going to write and when it gets put down, it'll get edited, rewritten, edited again, re-read and spell checked, then given to someone else to read, re-edit depending on what they say, then think damn-it I'm bored with this story and file it.

To think up something in a couple of seconds and then write something that's good enough to read out aloud is a different matter. I held my own, and even got a few giggles from the things I wrote, but all the time I was thinking that I'm wasting valuable writing time at home - you can tell I live in the middle of no-where and don't socialise much :)

To top it off they gave me homework! I've never been one for doing homework, my teachers at school never got any out of me when they told me I had to do it.

Sarah cleverly said that no-one was forcing me to do homework and I didn't have to do it if I didn't want to... bugger, now I have to do it. Actually, I stayed up last night after getting home and did it then!

I think it's quite nice to see faces, and great for people who are either unsure about their writing or need that push to actually put that book on to paper that they've always wanted to write - but I'm not really in either of those groups any more... we'll see in a month when the next one is planned, I'll keep you posted.