Image Credits: Some images via Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Others directly from Pixabay. All other photos taken by me, Allison Symes, from the Scottish Association of Writers’ conference, the London Jesuit Centre and the Association of Christian Writers Golden Jubilee weekend.
It has been a busy year to date and we’re only up to June. Earlier in the year I was at the Scottish Association of Writers’ Conference where I ran my flash fiction workshop. I also judged their Margaret McConnell Woman’s Short Story competition.
I’ve been on my travels again recently (and am enjoying getting good use out of my railcard once again. I am the woman who bought a new railcard two weeks ahead of the first national lockdown in 2020 in good time for going exactly nowhere – oops!).
It has been a great joy to run two workshops again recently. The first one was for the London Jesuit Centre and was called Finding Your Voice – Writing Fiction – How to Get Started. I was made very welcome and the workshop was great fun.
I always set writing exercises and it was lovely to see people enthusiastically having a go at these and being prepared to share work. I also try to leave time for questions at the end as these are always good for getting conversations going and can be a great way of learning.
Over the Platinum Jubilee weekend, I was at The Hayes, Swanwick, Derbyshire where I normally go to the Swanwick Writers’ Summer School in August each year. I look forward to being back there again later this year. But from 3rd to 5th June I was there as part of the Association of Christian Writers Golden Jubilee weekend called Worth Our Weight in Gold.
The Purpose of the Workshops
I would say they’re to encourage fun in creative writing, to encourage someone to give it a go (this was specially true for my Finding Your Voice one where I knew in advance the people going were relatively new writers), and to learn. They’re also a great way to network with other writers.
I’ve been to a number of workshops over the years (and continue to go to them) as I’ve learned so much from all I’ve attended. I sometimes go to ones not directly in my field. Why? Because I want to explore the wider writing world as well as my own areas of writing and I have always learned from these. Sometimes what I’ve learned does come in useful to me years later.
Workshops and Writing Exercises
I like writing exercises, whether I’ve been given them to do or if I set them. They encourage creativity and the great joy with jotting something down in a workshop environment is nobody expects perfection. What you are coming up with is a rough first draft. Often a very rough one!
The idea of the exercise is to reinforce what you’ve just been listening to and taking in. The exercises also give you something to polish up later at home (and I would hope people would do that and go on to submit those polished pieces. I have gone on to have work published doing this).
It is useful to have people prepared to share their first drafts in a workshop too. It can encourage shyer ones to give it a go. (I know. I have been one of those shyer ones). Also a tutor will often give some feedback on what has been read out. That should encourage the writer. Other attendees will listen to your work being read out and that may well encourage them with their own work.
Getting Material Ready
I prepare as much in advance and a long way in advance too. The nice thing now I’ve got a flash fiction workshop to hand is I can amend it in places for differing audiences while keeping the core material the same. That won’t change but its application can, depending on the experience of those at my workshop.
There is always new material to add too. A writer keeps learning and developing their writing. That in turn leads to new material for workshops!
I record my workshop on Zoom too by setting up a meeting with myself and hitting the record button. At the end Zoom converts the file into an mp4 for you. I play these back so I can hear how I come across and it is an invaluable aid to getting my timings right.
For my ACW talk my recording came in at about the hour mark and yet my session was for ninety minutes. Problem there then, Allison, surely? Err… no actually, I wanted the material to come in at that hour mark as I wanted to leave time for (a) questions, (b) to give people a reasonable amount of time to have a go at the exercises I set, and (c) to read out work if they wished to do so.
Not All Work
The ACW weekend was a great opportunity to catch up with old friends and make new ones. I am the Membership Secretary of ACW so it was lovely to meet in person people I’ve enrolled. There was also opportunities for people to ask me questions abut my workshop there wasn’t time for in the session.
My workshop was on the Saturday morning just before lunch (which is a vital reason not to overrun if ever there was one!). In the afternoon, there was an Open Prose Mic session where people could share flash pieces created in my session or which they had brought with them already. All good fun.
Reading your work out loud is a great idea as you literally get to hear whether your prose flows as well as you thought. Reading a finished piece of work out to an audience is an even better idea. What better advert for your work could there be?
Back in London
The workshop for the London Jesuit Centre focused on what good fiction is and looked at the importance of characters. I then showed ways of creating characters, creating situations, and then bringing the two together. That went down well and there were good discussions throughout the session.
I was encouraged by that. A good workshop should be interactive. Also I finished the workshop with a question and answer session which led on to talk about publishing. I hope the people who came to my session here did take home their draft ideas and wrote stories from them. I would be delighted if they ended up getting into print with them. But the point of this workshop was to get people started.
In Derbyshire
Here the writers were generally more experienced (though not necessarily in flash fiction writing). My workshop here focused on what flash is, its advantages to writers (there are loads of these, one of which is you lose all fear of editing, which is a good thing), and looked at ways into creating a flash piece.
I love workshops where I go home with something to develop further. It does reinforce what you heard at the time and I think it is a valuable learning tool. Again, I would love it if those at my workshop took their ideas home, wrote them up, and ended up having them published somewhere.
No Jubilees for ages and then we have two at once!
It hadn’t escaped ACW’s notice there was another Jubilee on! We raised a glass or two to Her Majesty at our reception event on the Saturday evening. Nice to put on some glad rags for that too. (Incidentally, did you get to see the lovely post box at Hiltingbury Post Office? If not, see the pictures below. I thought it was lovely and the sight of the post box “cosy” made people smile).
Of course ACW were rather thrown by the pandemic. We had wanted to have our Jubilee event at the beginning of our Jubilee year (2021) rather than at the end of it (2022) but Covid put paid to that so we had to push our event back.
We had a lovely time in Derbyshire and we hope everyone who wanted to enjoyed Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee events. I did enjoy watching Elizabeth: The Unseen Queen which HM narrates and I highly recommend that if you haven’t had a chance to see it. The footage is from HM’s private collection, very much a behind the scenes look, and the music they put behind it was lovely too.
Conclusion
Workshops come along more often than Jubilees due to the nature of the latter! Writing workshops are worth going to as you will learn from them and I’ve found them to be a great source of networking opportunities! Getting together with fellow writers over a cup of tea during refreshment breaks is a wonderful thing and I usually end up learning something useful from them as well as from the workshop.
When I was starting out, it was this kind of conversation which led me to find out about Writing Magazine, the Society of Authors etc and I met the lady who went on to become my publisher at one of the first writing conferences I went to! Neither of us could have known at the time!
Think about what you want to get from a workshop. I was nervous about writing exercises and quailed at the thought of reading my work out in my early days going to these things. I now know that writing exercises will help me expand my skill set so I actively look for these in a workshop.
On realising my work didn’t have to be perfect, nobody expected that, I was happier about reading work out – and much needed encouragement was my reward for doing so. I then took that encouragement and used it to help me with developing my writing further.
Workshops then can be a great way of pushing your writing on. I hope you enjoy the next ones you go to!
Related Posts:-
Read interviews with Chandler’s Ford writer Allison Symes: Part 1 and Part 2.
Read blog posts by Allison Symes published on Chandler’s Ford Today.
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