Last weekend I attended the Northern Short Story Festival in Leeds. It was a bit of a last minute decision (just two weeks before the event) but, it turns out, an excellent one! I've come away all inspired and motivated, and feeling the need to network and achieve things with my writing, or at least attempt to (hence: blogging). Long may this feeling last!
 |
| I'm very focused, until the next shiny thing comes along... |
Two of the workshops I participated in at the weekend were particular highlights for me, and the thing they both had in common was the idea of using something small like a word, or an image, or a scientific concept, or an old newspaper advert as a jumping off point for your story.
When I first started writing (as an adult - I wrote stories as a child/teenager and then took a long hiatus!) I wanted to write a novel. This resulted in any number of abortive NaNoWriMo attempts, all of which are now languishing on my Google Drive. Some are worth revisiting; several are definitely not! What's interesting is that most of the more recent ones are more like interconnected short story collections in their conception (or would have been if I'd actually written the damned things...). Perhaps I should have taken that as a sign of where my brain wanted me to focus.
The past few years I've been playing a lot more with flash fiction and poetry (and things that are somewhere in between). I like how you can play with language in something that's so short as to be almost abstract, and yet still try to tell a story. That's one of the things I took away from the two workshops I mentioned above - creating a moment out of something seemingly small or obscure, but trying to do it in a way that feels bigger than it is, part of a wider story.
I'm not quite sure what my intent is with this post, beyond trying to capture my current enthusiasm by writing about writing, but anyway - here it is! Maybe I'll manage the next one a little sooner than four years time, eh?
No comments:
Post a Comment