Workshop Writers&#8217; Work

Games by Sho Botham

Modern Warfare by Ivor John

The Fixer by Juliet Robinson

Jaffa Oranges by Lesley Dawson

Manifesto by MaryPat Campbell

I am Haunted by Humans- a timed exercise by Rosalyn St Pierre

Read Rosalyn’s piece

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NARRATIVE DEVICES

For this week’s timed exercise I asked our writers to open their timed exercise with this line:

I don’t consider myself a real peeper—they go in for bedrooms, but it’s families in sitting rooms or kitchens that thrill me.

This is a quote from The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, published in 2008.

Written in letters the novel is set shortly after World War II mainly on Guernsey, a small British isle off the coast of France. The plot centres on London-based journalist Juliet Ashton, who finds her next book subject through her correspondence with the residents of the island of Guernsey, which had been occupied by the Nazis during the war. She is drawn to their stories of the occupation and especially to those of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book club formed on the spur of the moment as an alibi to protect its members from arrest by the Germans. The journalist’s life changes profoundly when she finally visits Guernsey.

We discussed narrative devices including the epistolic. A narrative device is a writing technique you can use to tell a story. Narrative devices combine elements like tone, point of view and tense to create a consistent narrative that the reader can follow throughout a story. You can consider your genre and other examples of narrative devices when detailing your plot, characters and setting to see if a narrative device may help you tell your story or emphasize your purpose. There are different narrative devices you can use that can affect point of view, theme, style, plot and setting.

For your homework I asked you to use the epistolic narrative device and to use this line from The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

We clung to books and to our friends; they reminded us that we had another part to us.

I read my column ‘Gingerly’ from my first collection of columns, ‘The Familiar’ Read it here

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Remote But Not Working by Ali Giles

Clinging On by Fran Duffield

Bedrooms by Juliet Robinson

Hello by Sue Hitchcock

Surprise, Surprise by Sho Botham

Long Shadows by Juliet Robinson

Divided by Sue Hitchcock

Dave and John by MaryPat Campbell

Imagine if it Was You by Stuart Finegan

Read Stuart’s piece

Gallery of Faces- a timed exercise by Mia Sundby

Read Mia’s piece

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PINOCCHIO

For this week’s timed exercise I asked our writers to open their piece with this line:

I am writing this account, in another man’s book, by candlelight, inside the belly of a fish.

This is the opening line of Edward Carey’s illustrated novel The Swallowed Man, which tells the celebrated fable of Pinocchio from the perspective of the living puppet’s father Giuseppe—better known as Geppetto—beginning inside the belly of a whale. Though the novel does not occur entirely within this unconventional setting, it both foreshadows and establishes the stakes for the story that is about to unfold, gripping the reader from the very first sentence.

This version of Pinocchio’s narrative arc aligns more or less with Collodi’s: man buys wood, man begins carving marionette, marionette slowly comes to life under its creator’s hands, marionette runs away, man searches for him and ends up inside a fish. But Carey is more interested in what happens to the carpenter when he’s left alone with a book in which to write his thoughts.

Fiction abounds with memorable liars. Tom Ripley, Jay Gatsby, and, moving further back in time, Odysseus, all come to mind as prime examples of memorable figures who understand truth and deceit as flexible concepts. Lies in fiction can fulfill a number of roles: they can spur conflict, illustrate a character’s own reliability or lack thereof, or alter the very fabric of a narrative, thoroughly messing with the reader’s head.

For the homework I asked our writers to use this line from Pinocchio anywhere in their piece and for their protagonist to be a liar:

A conscience is that still small voice that people won’t listen to.

I read my column ‘Animal Crackers’ from my first collection of columns, ‘The Familiar’ Read it here

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Conscience by Sho Botham

Words Don’t Come by Janie Reynolds

Still Small Voice by Fran Duffield

Not a Day over 40 by MaryPat Campbell

The Workings of my Mind by Stuart Finegan

Read Stuart’s piece

Silence – a timed exercise by Ivor John

Read Ivor’s’s piece

Unlucky- a timed exercise by Fran Duffield

By Candlelight – a timed exercise by MaryPat Campbell

Functional Integrated Super Habitat – a timed exercise by Sho Botham

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FEBRUARY

WAIT

For this week’s timed exercise I asked everyone to open their piece with just one word:

Wait

We looked at the American poet Galway Kinnell’s poem ‘Wait’ Read it here

I also read from Katrin Schumann’s article When Being a Writer Means Playing the Waiting Game – which I’ve attached. Schumann’s debut novel ‘The Forgotten Hours’ was a bestseller. I read the prologue of Schumann’s second novel ‘This Terrible Beauty’.

On the windswept shores of an East German island, Bettina Heilstrom struggles to build a life from the ashes. World War II has ended, and her country is torn apart. Longing for a family, she marries Werner, an older bureaucrat who adores her. But after joining the fledgling secret police, he is drawn deep into its dark mission and becomes a dangerous man.

For the homework I asked everyone to use this line from the novel anywhere in their piece:

Silence isn’t always empty, is it?

I read my column ‘Jammed’ from my first collection of columns, ‘The Familiar’ Read it here

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My Friend Mary by Ali Giles

Silences by Fran Duffield

Question by Sho Botham

Power by Sue Hitchcock

The Retreat by Lesley Dawson

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My Friend Mary by Ali Giles

Silences by Fran Duffield

Question by Sho Botham

Power by Sue Hitchcock

The Retreat by Lesley Dawson

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PHOBIAS

For this week’s timed exercise I asked you to use this line anywhere in your piece:

Would you like an adventure now, or would like to have your tea first?

This is a quote from Peter and Wendy by JM Barrie. Peter Pan suffers from gerascophobia (fear of growing old) Peter Pan is petrified of growing up—so petrified, in fact, that he forms an entire colony of mild gerascophobics (you may know them as Lost Boys) and teaches them to basically worship him. And while we’re in Neverland…Captain Hook suffers from herpetophobia (fear of reptiles) His herpetophobia is incredibly specific—it’s limited to one type of reptile, and one particular specimen of that type: The croc with clock inside it.

As Sarah M. Connelly from Gettysburg College observes: “Peter’s forgetfulness— a cognisant decision to avoid any advancement in character, age and maturity— acts as the surrogate to his tragic downfall. Instead of one fall from grace that a tragic hero needs to meet in order to learn about human nature, Peter’s tragedy is constantly occurring, to the point where he forgets that he is tragic. The peripeteia that results from his forgetfulness does not climax until the end of the story, when Wendy and the Lost Boys leave Neverland, but one can see the warning behind Peter’s story: without a home and without guidance, we are vicious and, inevitably, heart breaking.”

For the homework I asked everyone to use this line from Peter and Wendy anywhere in their piece and for the protagonist to suffer from a phobia:

I suppose it’s like the ticking crocodile, isn’t it? Time is chasing after all of us.

I read my column ‘Lofty’ from my first collection of columns, ‘The Familiar’ Read it here

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Getting to the Bottom of Things by Jill Webb

Listen to Jill’s piece

Crocodile by Fran Duffield

Timeless by Sho Botham

Claustrophobia by Sue Hitchcock

Where is my Hand by Lesley Dawson

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TIME

For this week’s timed exercise I asked everyone to us this line in their piece:

But this is such a pleasant day: wouldn’t it be nice to have just a little more of it?

This is a line from David Kirby’s poem “The Hours,” in which the poet reflects on a subject that feels more significant at the start of a new year: the presence of time. “I’m going to rely on you hours to lead me, / to open one door after another and beckon / me through. Look it’s time to make lunch. / Look, it’s time to go back to work.

Look, / it’s time to rub cat Patsy’s belly again,” he writes. Read it here

I read Margaret Atwood on ‘time in fiction’ – Read it here

I read the opening of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. The original title for the novel was ‘The Hours’ and the work has a preoccupation with time, not just ‘clock time’ but ‘remembered time’.

All of the novel’s action, aside from the flashbacks, takes place on a day in “the middle of June” of 1923. It is an example of stream of consciousness storytelling: every scene closely tracks the momentary thoughts of a particular character. Woolf blurs the distinction between direct and indirect speech throughout the novel, freely alternating her mode of narration between omniscient description, indirect interior monologue, and soliloquy. The narration follows at least twenty characters in this way, but the bulk of the novel is spent with Clarissa Dalloway, Peter Walsh, and Septimus Smith.

I asked everyone to use this line from Mrs Dalloway anywhere in their homework and to consider time as a theme or a motif.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

I read my column The Mystery Guest from my first collection of columns, ‘The Familiar’ Read it here

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Once by Ali Giles

Old Habits Never Die by Janie Reynolds

Pandora’s Box by Juliet Robinson

Wrong by Fran Duffield

Thirteen Days by Sho Botham

Is it Necessary by Lesley Dawson

Gerard Knows Best a timed exercise by Mia Sundby

Read Mia’s piece

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TRANSFORMATION

For this week’s timed exercise I asked everyone to open their piece with these two short sentences:

Ove is fifty-nine. He drives a Saab.

This is the opening of A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman. Fredrik Backman got tepid responses when he sent out the manuscript for his debut novel, A Man Called Ove. Most publishers ignored him, and several turned it down.

After a few months and a few more rejections, he began to think perhaps there wasn’t a market for a story about a cranky 59-year-old Swedish widower who tries and fails to kill himself. “It was rejected by one publisher with the line, ‘We like your novel, we think your writing has potential, but we see no commercial potential,” said Backman who lives outside Stockholm with his wife and two children. “That note I kept.”

In hindsight, that critique seems wildly, comically off base. Ince its publication in 2012 the novel has sold more than 3 million copies worldwide and has been made into films, most recently starring Tom Hanks in the title role.

The novel’s protagonist, Ove, is a lonely curmudgeon who screams at his neighbours for parking in the wrong place and punches a hospital clown whose magic tricks annoy him. Six months after his wife’s death, he’s planning to commit suicide and has turned off his radiators, cancelled his newspaper subscription and anchored a hook into the ceiling to hang himself. But he keeps getting interrupted by his clueless, prying neighbours. He strikes up a friendship with an Iranian immigrant and her two young daughters, who find Ove’s grumpiness endearing.

For the homework I asked everyone to use this line anywhere in their piece:

It is difficult to admit that one is wrong. Particularly when one has been wrong for a very long time.

I read my column The Fabulous Baker Boy from my first collection of columns, ‘The Familiar’ Read it here

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Sol y Sombre by Fran Duffield

Glorious by Janie Reynolds

Saquin Point by Juliet Robinson

Who Are You? by Sho Botham

Lucifer’s Wish Disguised by Her White Collar by Stuart Finegan

Read Stuart’s piece

Retirement Dream by Ivor John

Read Ivor’s piece

Fairy Godmother or Wicked Stepmother by Sue Hitchcock

Drunken Safety Blanket – a timed exercise by Juliet Robinson

Gerard Knows Best a timed exercise by Mia Sundby

Read Mia’s piece

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ARTEFACT

For this week’s timed exercise I asked everyone to open their piece with this line:

After a winter of gluttony & grief I’m back on plan for good this time.

This is the opening line of Kiki Petrosino’s poem ‘Whole 30’.

Originally from Baltimore Kiki Petrosino is the author of White Blood: a Lyric of Virginia (2020) and three other poetry books, all from Sarabande. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her memoir, Bright, was released from Sarabande in 2022. She directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia, where she is a Professor of Poetry.

Kiki Petrosino’s definition of poetry

“My definition of poetry is that a poem is the artifact or the trace that is left behind and created through the poet’s movement of mind over a problem or a situation.”

We discussed artifacts in fiction and in real life. As an example we watched a video clip of a 6 year old child prodigy Paul Petrescu playing Fur Elise by Beethoven. In 1867 Ludwig Nohl found an autographed piece of music by Beethoven among the papers of Therese Malfatti and published it – under the wrong title. Beethoven had a doomed love affair with Therese Malfatti. She was his 18 year old student, and he fell in love with her. He wrote a short but haunting piece for her – Bagatelle, but after she rejected him and his proposal of marriage the piece was shoved in a drawer. Ludwig Nohl misread Beethoven’s messy handwriting and so ‘Für Therese’ became one of the most famous piano pieces ever – ‘Für Elise’.

For this week’s homework I asked everyone to have their protagonist find an artefact from their past – an inciting artefact which could be something as personal as a photograph or journal. Or it could be a complimentary or derogatory note (or letter) that involves them that they had never seen before. Of course, you could also make it something fun like an old treasure map.

I read my column The Big Sucker from my first collection of columns, ‘The Familiar’ Read it here

Boxed by Janie Reynolds

I Wish I Hadn’t Told Ya by Jill Webb

Listen to Jill’s piece

All The Little Pieces, Inga by Juliet Robinson

Tea Towel by Sho Botham

Damascus by Rosalyn St Pierre

Read Rosalyn’s piece

House Clearance by Ivor John

Read Ivor’s piece

Grandfather’s Letter by Sue Hitchcock

I Kiss You – a timed exercise by Juliet Robinson