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October 27, 2005
Memories and Workshops
I lived in Norwich for a while, so for more reasons than one it was weird going back for the creative writing workshop the other day. Despite the major engineering works on the line, I still arrived an hour early, so I spent the time wandering about amongst some of my old haunts. One thing I realise is that I must think and remember in brighter colours than exist in real life. I’ve always imagined where I used to live as a white building but on Tuesday it seemed dirty and grey. I wonder if it was always like that or if it has deteriorated considerably in the past 10 years. I saw the self same hideous thick brown curtains in my old window and on our old balcony sat an ugly red plastic chair, no doubt my own backside had spend many an hour eating toast and marmite sitting in that very chair.
During the entire nine months I spent in that block I looked out over a construction site the other side of the road. I thought it would be interesting to discover exactly what it was they had built there. My guess at the time was that it was some sort of multi-storey car park and I wouldn’t know because dear God, they are STILL building. I hope it is something grand and magnificent as it seems to have taken them over 10 years to complete but unfortunately it still looks to me like a multi-storey car park.
I also trekked past a club that we used to frequent on a Monday night, it was all dilapidated and boarded up and appeared as if it had been so for quite some time. I know it was only a club but my memories had been of it heaving with people spilling out onto the street and it felt eerie and slightly poignant to see it like that, as if nobody had given it a second thought for years. In my ears I could almost hear an echo of Pulp’s Common People rattling through the holes in the boarding.
The workshop was part of the New Writing Types Event that has been running all week in Norwich. At first I wanted to spend the whole week there but in the end decided to back out ever so slightly and try one of the taster ’one off’ workshops and then if I found it helpful I could always book up for the whole week next year. The fiction workshop just happened to be held by Joolz Denby who I consider as one of my favourite modern day authors. At first I thought this would be really cool but as the time approached and as I read her latest novel that I felt guilty for not having got round to reading yet I became more and more nervous. For surely I cannot write and I was silly to ever convince myself that I could and there is making a tit of ones-self and then there is making a tit of ones-self in front of someone one admires and is likely to never have the chance to meet again. I had nightmares of her going to the pub with her mates afterwards and saying ‘I had this right Tit in my class today.’
In fact if it hadn’t been for the fact that my Mum had paid for the workshop as a Christmas present for me I probably would have found some lame excuse and backed out.
As you can imagine by the time I reached the door with her name on it I was nearly hyperventilating and then I opened it and saw the white table cloth and the bottles of free mineral water on the table. My God, judging by the different coloured caps you even had a choice of sparkling or still (and there was me with my sports cap Highland spring from the station) and oh my God me and white table cloths do not mix and some of the people sitting round the table looked like GOOD writers and some of them looked like writers who were going to start talking about their Muse and ohmyGodohmyGodohmyGod I wanted to go home.
But thankfully as I stood there someone (who probably wasn’t going to talk about his Muse) caught my eye and smiled and as luck would have it he had a spare chair next to him, so I leapt upon it (and him) like a crazed woman and managed to strike up a bit of a conversation. So by the time Joolz walked in and cheerily said,
‘Hello Everyone’ like a normal person and not an Orange nominated author, I too began to feel a tad more at ease.
And as it happened I was not asked to write 500 words in 5 minutes about what I was carrying in my handbag and then made to read it out to all the good writers just so they could laugh at my lack of vision. Thank God.
What we had to do was write a list of what frightened us as writers, what held us back and would you know, we all had the same fears; time, distractions, bad backs, PCs that don’t do as they are told and of course the old chestnut REJECTION.
Joolz helped us and put us at ease with some immensely practical advice, backing work up, investing in proper chairs, putting a particular time a week aside for all the crappy boring stuff such as covering letters etc and the most important thing of all? Read every day and write every day. It really is that simple.
Within half an hour I’d relaxed sufficiently enough that I was sprawled in my chair laughing and joking with the rest (or should that be the best) of them and by the time 7pm came it didn’t feel like I had spent 2 1/2 hours in that room which made me regret that I hadn’t stayed for the whole week after all.
I walked off gushing my thanks and feeling for the first time like a budding writer.
And nobody mentioned their Muse, not even once.
Posted by purple elephant at October 27, 2005 11:32 AM