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.
