Fifty people turned up in the Drill Hall for the Hay-on-Wye Writing Workshop, quite surprising when you consider that the fee was £25.00 per head for a two-hour session. Maybe billing it as a practical masterclass in the Festival Programme did the trick?
The high entrance fee also begged the question of who would turn up. [...]
In this article from The Weekend Australian, Jenny Sinclair suggests that all writing courses workshops should be outlawed. That the only people who should write are those that must write.
And then I got cancer. Death threatened, if merely statistically. Suddenly I left the dishes undone, let the washing pile up, declined social invitations, turned my back on my husband in the evenings, ran to the computer to write the second my child was asleep. I completed scenes as I waited for chemotherapy, scribbled plot outlines in the radiotherapist’s waiting room, wrote dialogue on the tram, jotted down two-word ideas in a notebook while my car idled at the traffic lights. I wasn’t sure where it was taking me, but in the fourth month, on a holiday to give me relief from the relentless treatments, I had an epiphany: it didn’t matter to me if I was any good as long as I wrote. The realisation was like a starburst in the dark of a hot, sleepless night in Thailand, and it hasn’t left me since.
But you should read the whole article. It isn’t long and it contains nothing but solid good sense. I was drawn to this piece by a blog post on Sharon Bakar’s Bibliobubuli.
If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to my RSS feed
Save a Blogger from Begging: Buy Stuff:
Signed first editions
at special prices.
Subscribe to posts
Recent Comments