The Course Of Course

My first session of my creative writing course got underway last night at MPH 1 Utama. Struggled over there with three bags of stuff (books, handouts, my homemade notebooks for the participants) - broken wrist and all. Mercy who was supposed to be giving me a lift but got up caught at work - and husband is so busy I can't even speak to him.

The bookshop has a nice big room for meetings and so on - plenty of space. Got a couple of young guys to rearrange the furniture for me so we all could sit in a cosy huddle. Wish the room had a bit more atmosphere though - maybe I should take my CD player next time and light some incense sticks for a bit of ambience. (To invoke the muse ... getting all touchy-feely here.)

Everyone came late - traffic jams and the size of the mall not helping matters. First writing exercise for the group was writing their receipts because I still can't hand write!

It's a very nice group and I feel that things are going to go well.I have a managing director of a fashion chain, a restaurant proprietor, a lawyer, a design student, two young women who work in the marketing department of the bookshop, and a couple of freelance writers/copywriters.

We break the ice with an exercise on why we want to write. I read them a lovely extract from Margaret Atwood's Negotiating with the Dead which lists all the reasons writers have given for writing:

To record the world as it is. To set down the past before it is all forgotten. To excavate the past because it has been forgotten. To satisfy my desire for revenge. Because I knew I had to keep writing or else I would die. Because to write is to take risks, and it is only by taking risks that we know we are alive. To produce order out of chaos. … To please myself. To express myself. To express my ideas beautifully. To create a perfect work of art. …To hold a mirror up to nature. To hold a mirror up to the reader. To paint a portrait of society and its ill. To express the unexpressed life of the masses. … To thumb my nose at Death. To make money so my children could have shoes. To make money so that I could sneer at those who formerly sneered at me. To show the bastards. Because to create is human. Because to create is Godlike. Because I hate the idea of having a job. … To justify my own view of myself and my life, because I couldn’t pretend tobe a ‘writer’ unless I actually did some writing. To make myself appear more interesting than I actually was. To attract the love of a beautiful woman. To attract the love of any women at all. To attract the love of a beautiful man. To rectify the imperfections of my miserable childhood. To thwart my parents. To spin a fantastic tale. To amuse and please the reader. To amuse and please myself. To pass the time even though it would have passed anyway. Graphomania. Compulsive logorrhea. Because I was driven to it by some force outside my control. Because I got pregnant by the muse and needed to give birth to a book. … Because I had books instead of children. … To search for understanding of the reader and myself. To cope with my depression. For my children. …To give back something of what has been given to me.

(Which reasons do you most identify with? I'd put myself down for several - but not telling which!)

And then we practiced flow writing. Writing quickly, going with first thoughts, not worrying about making mistakes with grammar spelling punctuation, not stopping to read back ...

The biggest hurdle of course is scepticism. There is a fear of making mistakes of getting it wrong - particularly as folks are insecure about their English and correctness has always been drummed into them. How can they be allowed such freedom on the page? I tell them correctness is important - of course it is - but when we're generating ideas and finding what we need to write, we can send the critic guy who lives in our head out to have a coffee. Some of them feel a little guilty about waving him off ... at least at first.

We practise flow writing with a stream-of-consciousness exercise, then jump off into space from phrases and individual words. I type alongside them on a small wordprocessor I've borrowed from Chet (it's a technological miracle - it does nothing but store words, so no distractions of the online kind!).

I leave them with plenty of prompts and exercises to see them through till next week.