July writing challenge

This can be a prose, or poetry or song, or indeed anything else you want it to be.

This is a 15 minute exercise so you’ll need a timer.

It hasn’t got to be long, or perfect, it’s about writing free-flow without the ‘editor’ in your brain taking over.

Try to do it fast, without taking a lot of time to think, plan, or worry … Just write what comes into your head, don’t stop, don’t go back over what you’ve written until the end of the 15 mins. If you get stuck, just write down whatever comes into your head.

Here are two opening lines. Choose one or both. Set your timer – then write.

• She’d always hated him.

• Outside my house, there’s a man in a blue car.

June writing challenge

June’s writing challenge set by Ian:

Write something, anything, prose, poem, dialogue, anything, inspired by all or part of the following stanza of a poem by e e cummings (as read by Michael Caine in ‘Hannah and her Sisters,’ from the days in which it was ok to like Woody Allen):

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

The only criteria is to avoid sentimentality.

May writing challenge

May Challenge:

A piece on the theme of a musical instrument (not the playing of it or the music  – which can be subsidiary themes) but the instrument itself,  a bit like Capt Correlli’s Mandolin or The Piano.

April writing challenge

“The Choice”

 

(some important choice or not that you have taken in the past, you are taking or need to take)

Could be real or fantasy 😉

March writing challenge

Our March writing challenge is:

“Walking on Colours”
Go for a short walk, paying attention as much as possible to one colour; list all the things found in this one colour then write a poem or short story about it.

Alternatively you can write something using any or all of the following words: key, basin, attic, font, purple.

As always, this is only a writing prompt for those who would like one.

Writing challenge for November

Mirror, mirror
This months challenge is about “fast poetry” or poetry in a flash.

Mirrors. Spend some time having encounters with mirrors. Try an old foxed or dusty mirror by candle light, snatched glimpses in shop windows, your hand seen in a car wing mirror or partial reflections of you or something else in many different places.

Choose a quiet spot and write as quickly as you can about mirrors, light or reflections of any kind. You are aiming at getting something down on paper or onto a computer screen quickly. Don’t worry too much about how it sounds and try to ignore your internal editor. You can revise your poem or prose on the following day but please bring both versions to the meeting to see what is lost or gained.

Writing challenge for September

Our next meeting is Wednesday 9th September.

Next to Charles Darwin’s tomb in Westminster Abbey is the tomb of Sir John Frederick William Herschel. In the opening lines of the Origin of the Species, Darwin wrote that his intent was “to throw some light on the origin of species — that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers”, referring to Herschel. Herschel was a friend of Darwin and a friend also of Charles Babbage (“father of the computer”).
I’m getting to the point, slowly.
In 1839, on the 9th September Herschel took the first glass plate photograph.

The September challenge is “Picture This“