Writing at speed

 This week I went to the Havant Writers' Circle meeting on Wednesday evening.  I'd got it into my head that it was a manuscript reading session, so imagine my panic when I discovered at 1 p.m. that I had to write something for a competition that evening.

I was supposed to be bringing a piece of writing for children, but I don't write for children, so that gave me a problem of what to write.  I'd been researching Unsinkable Sam, the ship's cat from HMS ark Royal in 1941, and that sent my mind down the track of humans rescuing cats.

I decided I'd turn the idea on its head and write the story from the viewpoint of a kitten.  And being me, she had to be a rebellious thing who asked why she needed to be adopted. 

I gave this story a science fiction twist by getting the cats to live on a colony world which humans had settled,  I also saw the opportunity to use environmental destruction to explain why the kitten needed to find a human to take care of her.

My wild heroine doesn't want to be cared for by a human.  She asks why she can't live outside, which gave me the opportunity to have the old tom who's running the meeting explain about the ruined land.

So my heroine kitten has to accept that she needs to be adopted.  Because I was writing from the cat's viewpoint I could present it as the cat choosing the human, and not the other way around.

So who should my kitten choose?  A young girl as wild as her, of course.  And when she saves the girl from the unwelcome attentions of a boy her chosen human adopts her.

All that story building and world creation got done within an hour.  The story could only be 500 words, so there wasn't much of it.  There was no room for any backstory, or much detail.  Which was just as well, as I didn't have time to invent any.

The story went down so well that it got joint second prize in the competition, and I got some useful feedback on how to improve it.  Not bad for an hour's rushed work!

I need to think the story through in more detail.  I'd envisaged the girl as a young teenager, then had the boy trying to kiss her.  The members felt that wasn't a good idea, and suggested I change that part to the boy bullying the girl.  Perhaps he's trying to steal her prized possession, which might be something like an ammonite fossil.

I like those ideas, and I will change the story that way.  I hadn't planned on doing anything with it, but there's a science fiction podcast for children's stories which it could go to after a good rewrite.

I've never written anything for a competition quite that speedily before, and I was pleased with the result I came up with at such short notice.  Maybe I should do speed writing more often.