Session 4 – A Reading and A Writing !
Stacey Campbell – Competition Winner Reading
President Anne Pettigrew – Light and Shade – How to create atmosphere in your writing
Apologies for the lateness of this post, life gets very busy at times
Last Wednesday’s meeting was back to ‘real life’, and there was a healthy turnout again.
Our topic of the evening was’ Light and Shade’ or’ How to create atmosphere in your writing’ but before Anne could give us her pearls of wisdom, competition winner Stacy read out her Short Story.
And what a story it was!
Called ‘Wolf’ and using her ‘ain tongue’ i.e. Scots language, Stacey gave us a story brimming with atmosphere. Two friends living in a post apocolyptic landscape with brief sightings of an almost mythic beast by one of the wee girls. The story had us all on the edge of our seats as the menace built up into pure terrifying fear.
No spoilers however as I can see this becoming a novel at a future date (or at least as part of another GWC publication).
And well done to our President for following that terrific story (or should that read terrifying), with a great session on incorporating description to create atmosphere in our work.
To start we all gave our favourite authors who are masters of creating atmosphere, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, George Elliot among the many.
Anne showed us how these authors involve our senses so that we almost become part of the story.
Our first writing exercise was to write two lists of ‘Light’ and ‘Dark’ words that could be used in our writing. This produced a varied and interesting discussion as everyones’ list was unique to how they interpreted the exercise.
Anne recommended Stephen Kings’ book – On Writing, and highlighted three parts to story writing
- Narration, moves the story along
- Description, provides a sensory reality
- Dialogue, life through speech revealing the story
Our final writing exercise was to create an atmospheric paragraph entitled ‘Looking out a window’, and this produced a number of interesting windows, characters and settings.
Finally I must share the excellent phrase that Laurie wrote in his piece, apologies if I have misquoted.
His window was ‘corpse of a portal to nowhere’. Wow!
Looking forward to next weeks Tea and Tunnocks.