Another productive meeting of the CWG this evening where N, A, D, V and I were in attendance, J, L and P having passed on their apologies.
We started the meeting by discussing writing point of views and style as N is currently writing the second in his trilogy of short stories and has hit a problem with dialogue as he is not sure it is working within the blog post style of the piece. This led to a discussion about plotting versus 'pantsing' and A discussed his 150k word 10 part sci-fi novel that he has yet to feel ready to edit.
N revealed that the second story in the trilogy was nearly finished and D informed the group that she has been working on her second draft of her WT 'TG' as well as going over the first 2k words of TSC following critique from an on-line group of middle-grade children's authors. They felt she had too much backstory, so she has taken some out and she has changed the order of some of the events in the novel. She has also sent TSC out to a couple more agents, after some cyber-stalking, and looks forward to meeting one of them in person at an upcoming Meet the Author event at Huddersfield Literature Festival (HLF). Since the last meeting, A has been working on the children's novel he has started and has sent a short story to the Writers & Artists' Yearbook competition. I have sent some more of my pieces out to writing competitions and V has been working on her story from the first CWG meeting she attended and made progress on her ghost story. She has also found some information on an Amazon writing course and HLF that she will has agreed to forward via email to the CWG members.
A provided a short story for the Group to workshop and the feedback was very positive. His story was an entertaining modern twist on the Billy Goats Gruff story and all the members enjoyed the humour. N liked the nods to other fairy tales and I liked the quirky mention of humans' plagiarism of a trolls idea. Also the dropping in of some of our human sayings and a troll perspective on them worked well. D felt that the main character had a very distinct voice and enjoyed the contrast between his perceptions and those of others in the story. We all enjoyed the dodgy lawyer character and the ending, though I felt it was a little abrupt and D felt that the Court room scene was too long.
N mentioned that Amazon currently have an open competition that he will forward the details about via email to the CWG members after Thursday.
D discussed the scrivener tool tutorial, recommending the system and giving examples of how useful it is to writers.
V will be attending the Mandy Sutter and Gill McEvoy author event and D and I will be stewarding at the HLF, so the other CWG members will be able to benefit from the information shared at upcoming CWG meetings.
The meeting finished with a 10-15 minute timed writing challenge with the following themes to choose from:
1. Quotes from Huffington Post "I'm not a reptile, I've never been in outer space" Politician publicly denies he's a space lizard.
2. Quotes from Huffington Post "Inmate escapes jail to meet his valentine."
3. Write a story whose forward movement is propelled by a characters belief in something, e.g. religion, astronomy etc.
4. A characters lie.
5. A characters suspicions.
6. A characters guilt.
7. A characters regrets.
The next meeting of the Cleckheaton Writers Group will take place on Monday 3 March 6-8pm at Cleckheaton Library. New members always welcome and meetings fortnightly thereafter.
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