O is for Open University

I absolutely loved the creative writing courses I took with the Open University a couple of years ago, so I thought I'd do a blog about them today.

The two courses I took were Creative Writing (A215) and Advanced Creative Writing (A363) - one at level two, equivelant to a second year university course, and the other at level three. Both courses encourage students to share their writing within a private tutor group forum so they can get feedback and help critique other people's work, and I found that a really helpful part of the course. The forum was also a good place to ask stupid questions and not have to worry about people thinking you were daft!

A215 was the lower level course and I think would probably have been suitable for someone who'd never written fiction before at all. Even for me, having been writing for years, it was really really useful, and I picked up so many useful tips and bits of information during the 9 months. The course book is a fantastic resource as well, and if anyone is looking for a creative writing book I would recommend it for the exercises and advice it gives.

From the OU description: The five-part course starts by showing ways of using your memory and experience and building a daily discipline. This is followed by demonstration and practice of the three most popular forms – writing fiction, writing poetry, and life writing (biography and autobiography). The concluding part aims to demystify the world of agents and publishers, teaching you how to revise and present your work to a professional standard.

A363 was more of a developing course and assumed that students already had a grasp on the basics of creative writing. It has been designed to follow A215, but I think it would probably be suitable for someone who has done any sort of basic writing course and knows the various terms and techniques. Something I particularly enjoyed was the chance to follow through a piece of writing and develop it. One of the first assignments is to write a short story, and then a later assignment is to turn that story into a script for stage, radio or film. It was nice to work with something I'd written and play with it to see what it could become, and it was something I probably wouldn't have tried if I hadn't been taking the course.

From the OU description: The course works on the forms introduced in the A215 – fiction, poetry and life writing – and supplements these with dramatic writing, showing you how to write for stage, radio and film. You’ll explore how these scriptwriting skills might enhance your prose style, improve your writing across the range of forms, and further develop your individual style and voice. The course offers guidance on professional layouts for the dramatic media.

For anyone interested in the A215 coursebook the details are:

• Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings
• by Linda Anderson and Derek Neale
• RRP £25.99
• ISBN-10: 0415372437
• ISBN-13: 978-0415372435
• Published by Routledge

J is for Jazz Night

Okay, I admit, this one is a bit of a shameless plug, but J is for Jazz Night - my first ever published poem.

The process of writing the poem started in September 2010 with a freewrite based on a picture by Jack Vettriano (below) and the song 'It looks like rain' by Jann Arden. At the time I wrote 'I can easily imagine this song being sung late at night in a club with dim lights and small tables. I'll see where that takes me and go from there.'

After I'd done the freewrite, it sat around in my files for a few months until I had an assignment for my Open University course on poetry. I dug out the freewrite and looked at it to see if it was suitable for making into a poem, and then started tearing it apart, separating sentences, looking for rhymes and rhythms, and seeing if I could recreate the picture I'd been using as a prompt in poetry. The rhyme scheme was deliberately relaxed - ABBA and not AABB - and loose, breaking down completely in the last stanza.

The finished result was published by Every Day Poets in June 2011, nine months after I wrote the first freewrite. It got some very positive feedback and was also one of the top poems of the month. Writing Jazz Night was a good lesson in patience and revision, as well as proof to myself that I could produce something that other people wanted to read and that was worth doing.

Jazz Night by Pam Griffin

The tables set back from the glare
seat men who come to lose the night
in whisky under muted lights,
in jazz, in blues, in cheap affairs.

No talking here, no friends, no food,
just whisky poured out by the dram,
and saxophone, piano, drum -
The perfect place to sit and brood.

The sultry singer shows her range
and tells about her latest sin,
while drinks are served by faceless girls
who take your cash – and keep your change.

OU Creative Writing update

Just thought I'd give an update on the Open University course I'm doing. The course description says:

By the end of the course you should be able to

• Write fiction, poetry, life writing and drama with a mature and sophisticated style and a greater awareness of elements such as repetition and analogy.
• Understand more fully the possible relationships between fiction, drama, life writing and poetry.
• Carry out background research for your writing, including the use of information technology.
• Empathise with characters and fully imagine and realise different eras and imaginative worlds in creating new work.
• Understand how dramatic writing methods might be transferable to other genres, for instance, to improve and develop prose style and voice.
• Demonstrate knowledge of dramatic writing, including knowledge of conventional layout for at least one medium.
• Demonstrate knowledge of the strengths and limitations of writing for different dramatic media, and what might be needed to write dramatic adaptations of fiction or life writing.
• Write with a greater awareness of formal constraints.
• Exercise a disciplined practice including willingness to revise and redraft.
• Present manuscripts and media scripts to a professional standard.
• Give objective evaluations of your own and others’ work through constructive criticism.
• Produce a piece of writing of substantial length which in its style, complexity and editorial awareness is drafted and redrafted to a high standard.

I'm really enjoying it so far, and the radio script writing was a lot of fun. The next assignment is to start planning a story which will comprise the end of course assignment. Must start thinking!

General update

I've been quiet recently, sorry, and part of that is because work has been really busy. In between meetings and trying to fit in sleep, I (foolishly!) decided to try Camp NaNoWriMo in July as well. This works on the same principals as the main NaNoWriMo in November, but happens throughotu the summer months.
What I wrote wasn't anything I'd plan to edit or send off anywhere, it was purely for fun, but it did the job of getting me writing large amounts on a regular basis again, which is something I'd been getting very bad at over the last couple of months.
I actually enjoyed it so much, and the support from the NaNo forums, that I've signed up to do it again in August.

Meanwhile, I got my final result from my OU Creative Writing course, which I passed comfortably, and which I'm very pleased about. I've signed up for the advanced course which starts in October. It should be interesting as it covers different areas of creative writing that I haven't really looked at before, like screenplay adaptions and so on.

I hope you're all having a good summer and I'll try to be more regular with my blog now!

Sounds exciting, no?

Advanced creative writing develops your writing ability by widening your generic range and developing your knowledge of style. The course works on the forms introduced in the Level 2 course Creative writing (A215) – fiction, poetry and life writing – and supplements these with dramatic writing, showing you how to write for stage, radio and film. You’ll explore how these scriptwriting skills might enhance your prose style, improve your writing across the range of forms, and further develop your individual style and voice. The course offers guidance on professional layouts for the dramatic media, and is a natural progression from A215.

More here...

A Good Six Months

Well the first six months of 2011 have been pretty good on the writing front, what with being included in Write for Japan, having Jazz Night accepted by Every Day Poets, and with the creative writing course going well.

In a non-fiction vein I've got into podcasting as well, and written two podcasts for 365 Days of Astronomy - End of an Endeavour (broadcast May 31) and The Universe in your Phone (broadcast May 28).

My goals for the second half of 2011 are:

• Edit, edit, edit...
• Start submitting the short stories I've been writing to magazines.
• Finish the OU creative writing course and sign up for the advanced course.
• Do NaNoWriMo with the story I almost started for my last assignment (provisionally entitled Flux).
  

Decisions, decisions!

The last month has been pretty hectic, which is why I've been quiet for a few weeks, sorry...

My final assignment for my OU course is due in at the start of June, so I'm working on that at the moment. I'm torn between whether to do the whole thing in fiction or whether to throw in a bit of autobiographical travel writing as well. And then I came up with an idea for a new novel, so now I'm wondering if I should use that instead. Decisions, decisions!

And some news - my poem Jazz Night, which I originally wrote as part of the OU course, will be published on Every Day Poets on June 17. I'll post the link here when it appears.

Revisiting The Last Sin Eater

In November I spent a very long month researching and writing about Shropshire's last sin eater, Richard Munslow. After a couple of months' break, I've been digging out the story again to start editing it.

Aside from finding the usual plot holes, inconsistencies and things that just don't work, I've also been trying to pull out bits of the story to use in my latest assignment for my creative writing course. The current assignment is to do a piece of biography - and Richard Munslow is a fascinating subject for that.

Now I've just got to condense the month's worth of research and writing into something a couple of thousand words long!

Poetry and charity books

Not much to say today. I didn't think poetry was my 'thing' but I seem to have done alright in the poetry part of the creative writing course, and one of my poems is now being considered for publication at Every Day Poets!

In other news... I'm getting involved in a project called (provisionally) Write for Japan, which is hoping to produce a book of short stories to sell for charity to help with the aid and rebuilding work for victims of the Japan earthquake. I'll keep you posted...

Happy new year?!

I am a terrible blogger, I'm sorry... I kept thinking I should write a blog, and then I never seemed to get round to it. Much like my writing so far this year. My OU course kept me busy with the first assignment due in in the second week of January, and I think with all the rushing around getting that done and in I forgot what it was like to write for fun.

I've signed up to WriYe, which is essentially like NaNoWriMo but with a more structured feel and it lasts a year. That has sort of helped get me writing again, but my total words for the year stads just shy of 10,000 at the moment, which is really pathetic when you consider I'd written that much in a week in November.

Of course it's the quality that counts and not the quantity, but even the 10,000 words I've written this month don't necessarily feel that I'm writing good fiction. In fact, the best things I've written were two made up newspaper reports about the same ficticious event written in different styles - one like a women's magazine and the other like a tabloid like The Sun. That sort of kick started my writing again, but I'm still not feeling particularly inspired.

I think I've just discovered the point where writing becomes hard work.

A quick update

I feel really bad for not having updated in the last couple of weeks, so I'm very sorry about that. I've been really busy with NaNoWriMo and with my creative writing course, and life in general has been busy as well.

The Sin Eater story is going reasonably well, although I feel that I haven't concentrated enough on the practice itself yet. Parts of the story I feel quite happy with, like a scene I wrote where Richard is having a panic attack over what he has done and his brother John is trying to calm him down and find out exactly what has happened. I'm happy with the character of the vicar as well, who is a secondary character but has some quite important scenes with Richard.

Richard's wife Ann, however, isn't coming out as well formed. I can't seem to decide if she accepts what has happened or if she's angry, and some of the things she has done will need fixing later. I can't imagine any nice Victorian woman laying into a respected doctor in a church at a funeral, even if he did suggest that her parenting skills weren't as good as they could have been.

I also keep tripping up over Victorian customs. I want it to be as well researched as possible, but obviously this is a work of fiction and not an historical text book. The funeral arrangements seem to have been very extravagant, but then that gives me scope to decide how much of that the Munslows would have had. Periods of mourning are something I have to remember as well, and trying to work out the timeline properly is still giving me a few problems.

That aside though, I'm enjoying the trip into Victorian England and I think, as a general rule, it's going well... Only 12,000 words to go!

Flash fiction competition and updates

Lots of updates here, so sorry for dotting around all over the place.

First, I found an interesting competition for flash fiction while I was browing the web this week. The 30 word story contest is being run by SmokeLong Quarterly to celebrate it's 30th issue, and runs throughout November. There's no entry fee, you can submit up to three entries, and the prize is publication in a special 30th edition of the magazine.
It says: "This is what we'll be looking for in the stories submitted for our contest - very short gems that are sparse, yet evocative."

The creative writing course is going really well and the first assignment is due in this week. If you want to try out what we have to do, you have to do a 200-300 word freewrite on one of a choice of subjects and then use that as the basis for a 750 word piece of fiction. I'm not going to post up the topics here just in case it's not allowed by the university, but last year's themes have included a search; learning to swim; a scrapyard; hearing a piano; and a bunch of keys.

The final very quick update is that I've now managed to keep my streak on 750words.com going for 39 days, and at 30 I became an 'albatross'. Lucky me. I get a phoenix if I can keep it up for 100 days.

Yes, it may just be a very small little image, but it's amazing what an incentive it can be!

Creative writing - OU course first impressions

So I started my Open University creative writing course last week and so far I'm really enjoying it and finding it interesting and very useful. The course book, commonly referred to as the 'Big Red Book' or BRB by students, is packed full of tips and tricks to improve the amount and quality of the writing you do, and includes lots of exercises to stretch you out of your comfort zone.

One of the things I haven't found much success with yet is the morning pages, which is basically what it sounds like - you write three pages of whatever comes into your head before you do anything else each morning. I'm having problems with this partly because I have problems getting out of bed in time usually anyway, and partly because my brain doesn't seem to want to work that early in the morning.

However, the freewriting from prompts has been brilliant, bringing up a few little ideas that might turn into something more later.

To combine the two (for the most part) I've been doing my daily pages on www.750words.com, which was born out of the idea of morning pages. So far I'm on a 21-day writing streak. That, apparently, means I'm a flamingo. In nine more days I'll be an albatross, but I really want to push for the 100-day-streak phoenix...

The sin eater's story

I can't believe it's almost NaNoWriMo time again! For the uninitiated, National Novel Writing Month challenges writers to pen 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days - that's 1,667 words a day. The novel doesn't have to be complete at the end of the month, or even readable, but the idea is that you finish November with the first draft of something that you can edit and improve on, and that you'll have improved your writing by just doing it so much.

Fortunately, the Open University Creative Writing course doesn't have any assignments due in November - possibly because they expect many writers to take part in NaNo? This means that I'll be able to concentrate on my novelling for the month while using the techniques recommended on the course to hopefully improve my productivity, creativity and technique.

Of course, before I start I have to have an idea. I've been struggling for a few months trying to think of something interesting to write about for the challenge, and I think I might have finally found something. There was a story on the BBC website this week about the grave of the last sin eater in England being restored. His name was Richard Munslow and he lived in Ratlinghope, in Shropshire, fairly near to where I live. Not much is known about Richard, although he seems to have been something of an unusual example of a sin eater, so I started wondering about who he was.

As a result I think I'm going to write a fictitious version of his story based on the facts that we do know about him. I think this will be an interesting project because it will tie together local history, folklore and creative writing - all things I'm interested in.

As an aside the course starts next Monday, so I'll post up a preview of the course materiels and so on later this week.

Song challenge: Day 10 & OU course

My OU course materiels arrived yesterday. Having a quick flick through the books it looks like it's going to be a very interesting course - more on that later when I've had chance to really have a read. The course starts on October 2...

On to today's song challenge - Day 10 – A song that makes you fall asleep

This song doesn't make me fall asleep, but it's on my playlist of songs that I play when I want some music to fall asleep to. It Looks Like Rain by Jann Arden is a beautiful bluesy type song with soft piano and relaxing vocals.

I'm not sure what I'm going to write about today, but I think I might just do a freewrite on the prompt of 'a singer in a club'. I can easily imagine this song being sung late at night in a club with dim lights and small tables. I'll see where that takes me and go from there.

Song challenge: Day 7

Day 7 – A song that you wish you could play

I love saxophone solos in songs, and one of my favourites is in George Michael's Careless Whisper. It's a beautiful song with a wonderful melody and touching lyrics, and then the saxophone comes in for its solo and it's just amazing. I don't play the saxophone, but if ever a song made me wish I did, it's this one, so that I could play the solo.

The lyrics talk about never dancing again, so I'm going to call the story I'm going to write from this 'Last Dance', and see where that takes me.

On a different note, my application to study the OU course in creative writing has been processed and I should get my course books at the end of next week. More on that when they arrive...

Song Challenge: Day 4 & OU Creative Writing update

Day 4 – A song that you hear often on the radio

This one has to be All Summer Long by Kid Rock. I've heard it twice in the last couple of weeks, and I don't listen to that much music radio, so that's pretty impressive.

I'm going to cheat a bit on the story part of this test. Rather than use the song as inspiration for a flash fiction, I'm going to use the picture of the house on the single's CD cover, and use that as a setting for a story. I'm thinking kids exploring an abandoned farm house during the school summer holidays and finding something interesting...

On to a slightly different topic, I've posted off all my registration forms for the Open University creative writing course and now I'm waiting for my books and so on to arrive. All the course material is supposed to be sent out by September 10th, so when it arrives I'll post more about it.

Taking a creative writing course

I'm in the process of studying for a degree with the Open University and as I was looking through the prospectus for my next course I noticed they have a creative writing course. It looks quite interesting, because although I know my writing is generally good, I'm sure I've picked up some bad habits, and I'm sure there are a whole bucketful of good practice ideas that I could use to improve my writing.

The course starts in October and I'll post updates and useful things I've learned as I go through the work. If anyone else is doing this course then drop me a note - I can always use a study buddy!