Post-Writing Fundamentals

The course ended weeks ago and I’m still buzzing from the inspiration it’s given me. The Writers & Artists’ Writing Fundamentals course are hands-down the best value for money I’ve ever had in a writing course, and Bill Ryan, the course leader, was fantastic in his feedback. The first thing I did when I finished the course was to put my novel in a drawer for a month and forget about it. I’d spent ten weeks engrossed in it, thinking through the characters and tearing chunks out of the various scenes. What surprised me most about the course was that reading and critiquing other writer’s works was a lot more useful than I expected it to be. Before this course I used to think that this exercise was just a lazy way of keeping students busy, but what I hadn’t realised was that by seeing the mistakes other people made, and listening to the feedback they gave me, I was starting to see a pattern to bad writing, and common mistakes. When you get your friends to read your novel, they’ll just tell you it’s nice. But when someone who doesn’t care about your feelings reads it, you get the feedback straight into the vein, and it’s a refreshing cold shower that jolts the system. Another thing that occurred to me before I made my weekly submissions was that I was expecting other people’s time to read what I’d written, and by being sloppy I was therefore disrespecting this somehow. All in all, the ideas I’ve had bubbling in my head over the past month on how to make my writing better in general, and Damaskopolis specifically, can’t stay in there much longer. It’s time to rewrite this thing into what it was always supposed to be.

Laptops charged!
Playlists loaded!

All systems are go…