Creative Writing
I have always enjoyed writing. Most of my career was in research and I was constantly aware that the result of performing a research task is simply paper and ink. The end report contains all the really important information you have discovered or reasoned, but all the customer actually receives is a piece of writing.
Most of my professional writing has therefore been technical facts. I really do not do a lot of reading, but I do have time now to try my hand at "recreational writing". I have submitted some railway articles to the hobby press, and have written for myself some of my family history so it doesn't get lost.
Years ago I joined a local Creative Writing Group, part of the Camelot U3A. I was the leader of this group for two years, Until a retired English teacher came along. We meet once a month for a couple of hours. The routine is to read out in turn our 500 word pieces on a topic that was set at the previous meeting. We have a little discussion about each one. Then we set a topic for the coming month. (We call this "homework"). Then we all write spontaneously for, say, ten minutes on a topic we have just been given by the leader or another member, and read this out too. There is no really formal instruction, but we get our leader to take us through a ten minute tutorial on some aspect of writing style. To get through all this in 2 hours we have to limit the number of members to about eight.
We tried to get a year's storys from the group printed in a booklet, bue the cost was uncomfortable. So i prepared my own annual antholgy of my own storys, which was easy to print myself.I am now preartng my seventh anthology.
Most of my professional writing has therefore been technical facts. I really do not do a lot of reading, but I do have time now to try my hand at "recreational writing". I have submitted some railway articles to the hobby press, and have written for myself some of my family history so it doesn't get lost.
Years ago I joined a local Creative Writing Group, part of the Camelot U3A. I was the leader of this group for two years, Until a retired English teacher came along. We meet once a month for a couple of hours. The routine is to read out in turn our 500 word pieces on a topic that was set at the previous meeting. We have a little discussion about each one. Then we set a topic for the coming month. (We call this "homework"). Then we all write spontaneously for, say, ten minutes on a topic we have just been given by the leader or another member, and read this out too. There is no really formal instruction, but we get our leader to take us through a ten minute tutorial on some aspect of writing style. To get through all this in 2 hours we have to limit the number of members to about eight.
We tried to get a year's storys from the group printed in a booklet, bue the cost was uncomfortable. So i prepared my own annual antholgy of my own storys, which was easy to print myself.I am now preartng my seventh anthology.