That creative spark

On the 2nd September I joined the members of Havant and District Writers' Circle for a retreat day.  This was the Circle's reward to the members for sticking with the Circle as we built it back up from the brink of collapse.

And we we handsomely rewarded.  Our workshop leader for the day was Crysse Morrison.  Crysse is a writer of novels, short stories, plays, and performance poetry.  Her novels include Sleeping in the Sand and Frozen Summer, which Katie Fforde described as "absolutely stunning". 

Both I and Writers' Circle Secretary Carol Westron have attended several of Crysse's workshops over the years at Winchester Writers' Festival, and we and a group of other writing friends have had Crysse do a private writing workshop for us.  So we knew we were in for a creative and challenging day.

Crysse began the workshop by asking everyone to write an acrostic based on their name.   It's surprising how deep those were. Forcing us to write as if we were crafting the lines of a poem made us    distil the essence of who we thought we were into a few choice, well-chosen words.

Crysse went on to talk about the value of lists, pointing out that they drive the internal critic away.  It's only a list, so there's nothing to criticise.  She used them to great advantage to get us to list smells.  That brought me two insights.  The first one was that I don't use smells enough in my writing, and that may be linked to the fact that my own sense of smell is poor.  While friends enthuse over the delicate perfume of a rose, I'm likely to smell exactly nothing.  My second insight was that, of the things I do smell, my preferred scents all belong to the natural world.

We explored "flow" writing, starting from a trigger phrase, then moved on to creating a character, when we returned to lists again.  Crysse had compiled a character generator, consisting of a long list of questions about a character, their motivations, psychology, and backstory. We used some of these to create a new character on the spot.  Then we took that character and created a first person monologue from the information we'd discovered. 

The day sparked everyone's creativity, and one of our members got the idea for his third novel from it.  If you're planning a creativity day I'd highly recommend Crysse and these types of exercise to refresh you and recharge your creative batteries.