A Literary Estate

The creative writing workshop

By Michael Crowley

Workshop participants
by Beverley Small

Seven people came to Oxhey Library for a creative writing workshop on Friday 1st June.

Writing about emotions

We began the morning with introductions then into some automatic writing exercises about the estate. Right from the outset it was clear that the participants were eager to write and to write autobiographically. The ethic within the group was naturally generous and respectful and participants shared their work at the end of each writing exercise. I followed the automatic writing exercises with some more personal memoir exercises drawn from a chosen emotion. Again people were at ease writing and sharing. I also read some of my poems from Close to Home.

Characters drawn from the estate

We then looked at story and character; playing a story game and creating a character drawn from someone on the estate each of them had seen but never spoken to. I asked the participants to gradually build a fictional biography based upon a real face.

The characters speak

After lunch we looked at the nature of monologue and I asked the participants write a short monologue for the character – which they did. We then returned to the memories that people had quarried in the morning. We did a ‘nouns and verbs’ exercise and I asked the participants to write a first person, present tense monologue connected to the emotional memory.

Writing from the workshop

This page was added on 15/06/2012.

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