May meeting: Saturday 24th, 4pm, Okini

Where: Okini is a tiny little Japanese tea salon just around the corner from Midica at Esquirol.  There’s no mobile reception in the salon as it’s underground, so try not to be late

Address: 19, rue des Tourneurs, 31000, TOULOUSE

What to bring: Pen, paper, a finished poem, piece of prose or do one of the exercises below, and money for a pot of tea of course!

Suggested writing exercises:

1  Write a short story that begins with your character peering out from behind a curtain.

2  Write a one-act play about a family vacation at a beach house.

3  Write a poem about water without using the word water.

Our next meeting will be held at an art gallery within a museum, followed by afternoon tea and writing — either there or at a nearby cafe.

Details as follows:
Where: Bemberg Museum at Hotel d’Azzezat, Toulouse
When: Saturday, April 5th, 2pm - 5pm.
What: The outing will be completely free, funded by last
year’s kitty money, and you should do a 15-30 minute writing
warm up before you get there.

If you are coming, please e-mail or call me (06 98 51 10 8 in advance.

For those who haven’t done last month’s homework, for whatever reason, try this instead:

“Write a finished short story or poem (no more than 2,000 words) that starts with ‘On Sunday…’

Deadline: April 3rd. Send finished copy by e-mail to me at narelle@naryves.com. I’ll make sure everyone gets a copy and
we’ll then have a week in which to make constructive criticism on each story to offer at the next meetup.

Also, Lesley has already done her homework: The Stones by Lesley Hale.

Cheers,
Narelle

Saturday, 26th January, 10am - 12pm

Meet us near the bar in the Crowne Plaza this month for the first workshop of 2008.

Bring a pen, notebook and a piece of poetry or an excerpt from a story you’ve written (maximum 400 words) to share with the group.

See you soon!

Dust off your notepad!

We’ve been a little slack at meeting since the summer holidays, but this will cheer you up:

The Toulouse Writers’ Group is getting back together in January 2008!

Meetings will be held on the last Saturday morning of the month, 10am - 12noon, as of Saturday, January 26, at various venues in and around the Toulouse city centre. For details of where we’re meeting for each session, you must e-mail Narelle (narelle at naryves.com) at least a few days in advance of the next meetup.

Further details of the meetings will be posted soon. Watch this space!

Time to sit back and unwind

Well, today’s session ended up being cancelled as attendance was going to be too low. People  are already starting to scoot off for holidays!

So this is it for us, for a couple of months at least. We’ll be sure to post if we organise any impromptu meet-ups or come up with any interesting writing exercises. As I said in the previous post, feel free to get in touch if you feel a strong urge to write over the summer!

Until next time, take care and be happy

Details

Well, it seems I’ve fallen a little behind in the posting and need to catch up on the last two weeks’ sessions since I believe tomorrow will be our last session for the summer. We should be picking things up again in September following ‘la rentrée’, hopefully full of inspiration and with some new members on board. If you do feel the urge to write over August or the second half of July, feel free to get in touch with me and we can try to tee up a time to meet. Until then, you might want to try some of these exercises we did in the last two sessions:

Exercise 1: “Details are who we are”. Write about some of the details that make you who you are.

Some interesting things came out in this exercise, but the overall consensus was that it is difficult to write about yourself. It’s definitely an exercise we’ll have to try again in the future.

Exercise 2: Word association. Start off with a random word in the middle of your page and end up with a web of words that are somehow connected in your mind. One, two, or more of these words will stay in the forefront of your mind. Start a story with them.

Everyone seemed to like this exercise and in fact we ended up doing it again last week. Saskia came up with a touching story about a homeless woman visiting a library. I won’t give any more away though, as she is going to try to develop this one. To give you an example of how the exercise works, “here’s one I prepared for you earlier”.

I started out with the word ‘precious’ and stayed with two words: ’stones’ and ’skipping’. Here goes:

 

I’m skipping stones while Mumma moans. I can hear her, it’s deafening. She’s over yonder in the cabin with Doc Greenwood. I didn’t think he’d come all the way out here, but he did and I’m glad. I couldn’t stand it. I can’t stand it now, hearing her pain. Every now and then she screams. When I least expect it. And it hurts my ears. If it weren’t so cold out, I’d go for a swim to try an’ drown it all out. Damn Pa. He’s never around for the births. He never has to see what she goes through it seems like every damn year. And Mumma’s gettin’ old now and inside I can hear her gettin’ tired. 5 skips, not bad. I’m gettin’ better at this. Lots of practise. Once a year, skipping stones while Mumma screams and moans. Pa doesn’t even know that Liz is gone. Went quietly in her sleep like an old lady. But she wasn’t old. It ain’t right. Skip skip skip. It ain’t right.

I pick up another stone. This time it’s bigger, heavier, not smooth and flat and round like the others. This time it’s going down. I hurl it out as far as I can. It splashes loudly as it hits the cold surface and with a silent scream I imagine it sinking right down to the bottom of the lake. She’s screaming now. Shouldn’t this get easier?

I should be fishing. That’s what I should be doing. Fishing to feed us. Mumma will be needin’ her strength, not some sissy boy who can’t handle her pain.

Exercise 3: “Details are who they are”. Exercise 1 repeated, but this time writing about someone we know very well.

Narelle and I wrote about our partners; Saskia wrote about her eldest son becoming a man.

Exercise 4: Free writing for 10 minutes about how you feel right now.

This exercise helps with getting you focused and in that writing mood, so it’s perfect for starting up a writing session.

Exercise 5: You are presented with a picture of a cabin in the woods. Describe what you see, describe what you don’t see - the interior -, describe the person you imagine coming out of the cabin.

This was a great exercise that unintentionally brought me back to Doc Greenwood from the Skipping Stones passage.

Exercise 6: Along with Exercise 5, this task was taken from here. We had to choose between about 5 of the options presented.

Narelle chose #9, a dialogue between a cat and a caged budgie. Visit Narelle’s blog if you’re interested in reading her piece.

Saskia, Chris and I chose #4, concentrating on people’s feet. You can read my piece on my own blog!

Exercise 7: Repeat Exercise 2 - Word association.

Posted by Natasha.

New venue for Toulouse Writers’ Group

Important: As of last week, our new meeting place is Le Bibent on Place du Capitole.  We’re still meeting at 4.30pm as usual.

Location, location, location

Today’s host: Narelle

It was around 30 degrees celcius and perfectly sunny this afternoon — one of the nicest days we’d had in weeks!

Chris, Natasha, Valerie and I arranged to meet at Prairie des Filtres, the park on the other side of the Pont Neuf which borders the Garonne river.

We settled on a wooden bench below a tall tree, with barely a metre of grass between our feet and the water. We wrote for two hours, side by side, slowly baking under the unrelenting sun.

As we wrote, ants crawled up our legs and ducks splashed about in front of us fighting for bread. At one point, a big black dog belly flopped into the river and later proceeded to stand behind Chris and shake off the water.

The focus was on exploring writing practice but there were too many distractions; none of us was focused. As a result, our writing was shallow and detatched. We had some funny moments, laughing out loud at the ridiculousness of what we’d written, but by the end I think we all left feeling quite bummed out with our efforts.

Next time, we’ll stick to our usual spot at the Crowne Plaza.

Here are the writing exercises we did. Please feel free to contribute your own writing in the comments section of this post.

Warm up: 10 mins free writing

Remembering the rules for writing practice, write for 10 minutes, without stopping, starting with: This morning…

Well done! Now take a break for 2 minutes. Don’t talk.

Now do the same thing, starting with: This afternoon…

Exercise 1 (From Natasha): 3 mins per paragraph

1. Write ‘When I was…’ on a page.
2. Beside that, write 3 different ages. (When I was 5, When I was 12, When I was 20, for example).
3. Now write a paragraph for each age, starting with ‘When I was’

Exercise 2 (From Natasha): 20 mins free writing
Start with a line from a short story and write and develop it in the third person.
Line: “Peter Dyson came home one day to find his wife dead in the garage”

From “The Turning -by Tim Winton”

Point of View

For today’s session, I wanted to concentrate on point of view. One of the most difficult things when starting off a new story can be finding the right voice, the best way to make a story work. I find that I often move from a first person narrator to a third person narrator right in the middle of my work, and of course as a result everything gets confused and I end up having to start over from the beginning. So this is something I would like to focus on in my own writing: a consistent point of view.

We started off by going over a story that I’m working on at the moment about Amy May, a twelve year-old who is going through some big changes. The story is (happily) getting longer, so it took a while to read through and discuss, which meant we didn’t get through all the work I had set for the day.

Exercise 1 - Free writing, but to get people started I had set 4 possible opening lines, trying to vary them a little so that there was some choice to make as to the point of view: “The water was cold”; “She had a long neck”; “We left early”; “I’m really hungry”

Here are a few extracts of what came out:

From Narelle:

The water was cold. I held my breath and waded in past my belly button, feeling the prickly sensation creeping over my bare skin. Suddenly I lost my footing on the concrete floor and slid right in up to my neck. I shrieked and flapped my arms about, trying to keep my head above water and then I started to feel warm and free. My long hair flowed around my shoulders like seaweed and for an instant I became a mermaid.

From me (Natasha):

She had a long neck. My father told me once that it was from peering over the neighbours’ fences. She’d strained it so much that over time it had stretched. Mum said Dad was unkind and that I shouldn’t trust anything he had to say about her, because he didn’t particularly like her. Apparently she had the most amazing collection of beautiful scarves - silk hand-painted or designer printed scarves - she would wear cleverly around her neck to disguise its peculiarity. Mum had managed to save a few before the house burnt down. She kept them tucked away safely in the attic, in a small faded red patent faux-crocodile suitcase neatly labelled “Aunt Beth”.

From Chris:

The water was cold but it didn’t matter; we liked to fish at all times of the year. We’d pass the time near a small lake a stones throw from my dads cabin in Colorado. We’d talk about world events, our lives away from work, new family arrivals, and those who have left us. Sometimes we’d think that the fish would laugh at us. Them down there, us up here. Not a nibble for hours. Catching a single fish in an evening would be good enough. In fact it would be surprising when you think of the odd times we’d try our luck at fishing.

Exercise 2: Choose a childhood memory and write around it in the first person - ie: from your own perspective. Most people have a range of memories, from the trivial to the traumatic - choose one that has some emotional power to it but won’t upset you to explore in writing. Alternatively, if you are a vivid dreamer, choose a recent dream and write it down, embellishing and developing where you see fit. (30 minutes) - this exercise was adapted from a “get writing” exercise (www.bbc.co.uk). Obviously in 30 minutes you can get through rather a lot of writing, so I’m not including full versions here.

From Narelle:

I was seven years old and had just moved up north to Queensland with my mum, my little brother, nan and grandad. We were the first ones in the street. Our houses were still being built — nan and grandad’s at the top of the street, ours at the bottom of the cul-de-sac. There was no road — just a wide dirt track and lots of gum trees. - Read the rest of this story on Narelle’s blog.

From me (Natasha):

(…) My sister and I headed down to the pool where I’d spotted another little girl riding around on a tricycle. I went looking for her and when I found her I asked her to lend me her trike for a little bit so I could have a go.
She just kept shaking her head and the more I begged, the more her little head shook, until finally she got sick of me and shouted out a shrill NO! before pedalling off at full speed around the pool. I tried to run after her, but didn’t count on the edges being so slippery and before I knew it, I was falling into the deep end screaming my head off. I could hear my sister screaming too and as her screams got further away from me I realised she was running away towards the lobby bar. Through my own screaming and tears I heard her shouting out “Come quickly! Help! Natasha’s fallen into the pool!”
And suddenly I heard the doors swing open and from where I was I saw adults streaming out of the hotel and running towards the pool, running towards my persistent screams. And then, to my horror, a half a dozen of them jumped. Some head first, some feet first, realising a second too late that the pool was empty.

From Chris:

I remember the early mornings when my dad and I would go to the flea market in Longhorn Pa. Sometimes he’d wake me around 5 in the morning asking me to join him. I’d always be ready faster than you could blink. Other times he’d find me waiting for him in the living room. I’d be watching TV with my coat and shoes on, bright-eyed, looking at him, the door and the car keys in his hand. Just like a normal kid of 13ish, I’d be looking for game consoles and computers that always seemed to be in my budget. My dad was my personal bank so I’d ask him if I had enough money for the things I wanted. I remember going off on my own looking for things that could fit in my hand, old coins, stamps; anything that seemed to be older than me and possibly older than my dad.

Homework:

Exercise 3: Re-write your story from Exercise 2 from the point of view of a third person narrator.

Exercise 4: This exercise will help you hone your writer’s eye and ear. During the course of the day, scan the local papers and be on the alert when watching TV or listening to the radio. You are looking principally for human interest stories - those quirky coincidences or situations which might start off a short story, play or poem. At this stage, you are only looking for sketches and starting points. Let the emphasis of this exercise be on pinpointing something to write about. Try to identify a starting point each day, based on the flow of information around you. If one of the stories particularly inspires you, why not run with it and start writing? (Thanks to bbc.co.uk’s “get writing”)

Feel free to try these exercises yourselves at home! If you feel like it, why not paste some of your work in the comments section?

A character’s voice

9th May
Today’s group was attended by Narelle, Saskia, newcomer Chris, and myself (Laura B). I was hosting my last group for a while since I am off to Scotland this weekend (sniff, sniff) but hope to be joining in over the internet.

To start we did a couple of warm-up exercises for 10 minutes each using the phrases ‘I see’ and ‘I hear’ as starting points. Saskia wrote a couple of lively starts to stories in this time which will hopefully be developed further. We especially liked one about a child being told off by his teacher. Chris, for whom this type of exercise was a first, took inspiration from images he’d photographed including the striking image of a rose in a cornfield. For the ‘I hear’ part most of us were influenced by the sound of the fountain in the hotel courtyard, though we all presented it in different ways.

For our other exercises we looked at character development, firstly by answering 11 questions in the voice of a character. This ranged from if the character ever had a nickname to their most obvious flaws. We then went on to write about our character’s attitude to family, relationships, history or beliefs. The purpose of this was so that we know a lot about the personality of a character even if we don’t then use all that knowledge in the story. Narelle used the main character from the novel she is working on which is sounding promising. I wrote about a character from my short story set in Toulouse while Chris and Saskia came up with new characters, a spy and a woman living in France. At home, we are hoping to develop these characters further.