Beginning my blog about creative writing
May 10, 2009 at 9:33 pmI decided to start this blog because I wanted to share, with anyone who’s interested in writing matters, a little of what I’ve learned about the craft of writing over 25 years or so, and the highs and lows of these experiences – as well as giving updates about my novels and poetry, and any future talks or readings I’ll be doing.
I started thinking about this a few weeks ago when I was staying in Relleu, an (almost) unspoilt mountain village in Spain. I’d enrolled on a poetry course run by Penelope Shuttle and decided to arrive a week early to give myself time to focus on my writing.
The weather was much colder than I’d expected - and wetter. For this first week, I’d rented a flat from the owners of Almaserra Vella, the beautiful house where ‘my’ course would be held.
Half way through the second morning, I realised that the heavy clouds were fraying at the edges, revealing patches of brilliant blue. I was just about to go out for a walk, when my eye was caught by the title of a book on a shelf nearby: The Founding of Arvon – A Memoir of the Early Years of the Arvon Foundation by John Moat.
This might not sound very exciting to you, but it seemed like a good omen to me, at a watershed in my writing ‘career’. That book was a direct link back across more than two decades, to when I’d first started writing seriously. My second child had just started school, and I was staving off the day when I’d have to take on more work. Two evenings a week of Adult Literacy classes didn’t bring home much extra money, but I wanted to keep the day times free to develop my writing.
Becoming ‘a writer’ was proving harder than I’d thought. The stories I was sending off to Radio 4 for their ‘morning story’ slot returned with the regularity of homing pigeons. By mid-November, it was becoming clear that I needed some impartial feedback, so I decided to look around for a creative writing course.
At that stage, I’d never heard of the Arvon Foundation – or any other residential writing courses, and even if I had, there was no way I could have afforded to spend that kind of money on myself. I knew that my (very part-time) employer, Birmingham Adult Education Service, provided weekly courses in all sorts of subjects, including Creative Writing, for a relatively modest fee. With any luck, there’d be a course nearby that I could join the following term.
There was a course, but not in quite the way that I’d expected.
March 30th, 2010 at 10:35 pm
[...] I was lucky enough to stumble across this wonderful blog soon after I’d made my first tentative step into the maze of Blogdom last May, Beginning my blog about creative writing. [...]
June 9th, 2010 at 11:30 pm
[...] I missed my first blog [...]