I’ve been off gallivanting today with Ali at a writing day. It was a good one too. I love the writing days, I have spent time in the company of a range of people I would never have otherwise crossed paths with and as well as the valuable writing exercises, the feedback on my own work and being impressed, inspired and awed by others I always get huge amounts out of just spending time with the group generally. I feel like I am very ‘me’ there without any need to temper myself and that’s nice :). Today we did writing on ‘the stuff we don’t know’ including a really good exercise in the style of Sliding Doors which I found very theraputic. I also got a vast message from the writing of one of the other attendees which was very pertinant to me and some things I’ve been thinking about and possibly came at almost precisely the right time. I have struggled with some of the exercises in the past due to not having quite the right sort of tortured soul that true creativity seems to require and being altogether too optimistic and sunny natured. I still struggled with that today but think I might have found the key to working through that, which is good. 🙂 As ever there were plenty of laughs and shared in jokes with the people who have been attending for a year now and some new faces who were nice to meet and added to the group, particularly the woman I sat next to who was funny, interesting, reminded me of Christina off last seasons Apprentice and brought BEEF sandwiches to what is usually a cous cous and hummous heavy table :lol:.
I got home around 6pm and heard all about Ady, Davies and Scarlett’s day which seems to have been good. They have done tidying, playing, drawing and been enhancing the bantams new run with perches and enrichment type stuff like cds to peck at and some cuttlefish from the beach. Dad had called round for an hour or so too. Davies and Scarlett got caught up watching Primeval and discussing the dinosaurs at length. We seem to have had something of a revival in interest in dinosaurs here lately with Davies refreshing his passion and Scarlett getting into them too, which is great, the one thing we’re not short of is resources to satisfy dinosaur interest 😆
Tomorrow afternoon we’re off to Liam’s birthday party and I think we’ll have a quiet morning followed by a quiet Monday. Ady goes away for two nights on Monday so I’m thinking of piloting my later nights, different eating patterns for the children ideas while he’s not around and my evenings will be different anyway.
The “story at the right time” thing is interesting. I know you aren’t desperately keen ;-), but one of the most powerful exercises on the NLP training is when people write and tell metaphors for each other. The amount of times people say “how did you know that story would work for me?” is amazing.
It was a good session, that group does feel very comfortable now doesn’t it? Even with new people in each time, the core seems quite stable now and a good mix of people.
And more importantly food.
Interesting about the NLP exercise using metaphors, Joyce.
Your group sounds great. I’ve just started a four week evening course in short story writing. The first session was a short story all by itself! I’m being challenged to tackle plot, and structure, a bit more. All good stuff. I can do tortured soul but have real trouble actually making anything much *happen*.