For the last week I’ve been at a ‘co-living, co-working’ thing called ‘Remote Roots’ with a group of people who what started as interesting strangers, and ended as a group of new friends. I’ll write more about it another time, probably next week, but for now I want to talk about a workshop I ran.

One of the things Nici, who runs the trip, does is encourage everyone to run a workshop or activity of some kind to get to know the people you’re spending time with. We had a lot of yoga, someone talked about ‘the athlete’s mindset’, someone else about ‘EU funding’, how to make dumplings, and I did one on creative writing.

The end result was that everyone around the table ended the hour or so session with the start of a short story. I’m going to publish as many as there were people who will let me on this blog, but for now in the sprint of ‘show your work’ I’m going to briefly describe the workshop itself.

I stole a lot of ideas from workshops I’ve been to and made some stuff up too. It’s split into two part, the warm up, and the exercise.

The warm up

We started with a simple creative exercise where I made up a word, something like ‘Limbado’ and I gave everyone two minutes to make up a definition for it. This got everyone’s brains ticking. We read them out and both laugher and intrigue began.

Next I got everyone to make up a word for themselves, put them in a hat, and then pick a different one out of the hat and make up a definition for it. We read them out again, laughed and listened.

Finally, I took five mundane words from the group and asked everyone to pick one and ‘redefine’ it. There was ‘Nice’, ‘Accountant’, ‘Taxes’, ‘Tired’, and something else. By now the creative juices, and the wine of course, was flowing.

The idea behind the warm up was to get people to get creative and to lower the bar to getting started. One of the things that often tripped me up when I started writing was getting over the perfectionism of trying to get the right words.

The idea behind these warm ups was to show everyone that words are really quite meaningless, you can do what you want with them, and everyone thinks at least a little bit differently anyway, so who cares what you’re readers think.

The exercise

Now that everyone was warmed up I presented a photo of an old, smiley woman (below). I asked everyone to write five sentences explaining why she is making the expression she is making. They were to only be a sentence long, but should all be different. Now we’re focusing our creative juices past words, and into association, and stories.

With one of those sentences I had everyone ‘spider write’, write one interesting word from one of the sentences in the center of a page and play a word associated on game. Write a word next to it that you associate with the central word, and keep going with that word, and then another, and then another. This went for 5 minutes, everyone filled at least half a page and could have gone much longer.

Finally, we go the the big bit. Some ‘Free writing’, the technique I use most everyday to write, well pretty much everything. I gave everyone a new piece of paper and asked them to circle the sentence they wrote that they liked the most, and three words from their ‘strider writing’ exercise. With that sentence, and those three words they were to write a story about the old woman.

But the trick with free writing, is you can’t stop. You can’t take your pen off the page for more than the space of writing a new word. If you get stuck or you don’t know what to do or write next, you have to write that, you can ‘talk to yourself’ but you can’t stop writing. I only gave everyone 10 minutes becuase it was late and we had more things to do but it went wonderfully.

Afterwards, we read some of them out to each other and I was wonderfully surprised by how different, good, and reflective they were of the person that wrote them. Of course no one got to a good ending but everyone gave me good feedback and at least told me they enjoyed themselves.

It was loads of fun to run and I’d love to do it again. Maybe I’ll think about an online course or something. We’ll see. If you’re reading this, and you were in the workshop, let me know 😉

- Rhys