Writing Workshop – The girl and the jam jars

Posted by Josie on Oct 24, 2011 in Creative Writing, Writing, Writing Workshop | 7 comments

She sat in front of two jam jars, one smelling faintly of pickled onions and the other so old she couldn’t even remember what had been in it. With looped lines she wrote two labels and stuck them on, one on each: Missing and Found. And then she sat with the pen in the end of her mouth and thought hard.

With a sigh, it was easy to write the first one, her hand moving to fetch a slip of paper she had cut, writing in careful, neat capital letters, folding the paper to drop it into the Missing jar. Best to get that one out the way, and no need to dwell, was there really. Those thoughts had been thought before. She could bury it under other things missing, to help forget about it for a while. And after all, she doubted that particular aspect of her life would be missing for that long. “You’re just in there temporarily, okay?” she said aloud, reaching for another slip of paper. Right, what else was missing? She prodded the word in her head, but found it unbudging. Words sometimes like to take on the character of resistant old toads, she had found, so she shrugged, fair enough, we’ll come back to that one then.

Writing Workshop Prompts – Missing

Posted by Josie on Oct 18, 2011 in Writing, Writing Prompts, Writing Workshop | 0 comments

I wrote a post on Sunday that seems to have touched a nerve a bit. And not just with single people, it seems, which just goes to show that a sense of missing something is something a lot of us have hanging over us sometimes.

So I thought maybe that’s what we could write about this week.

(For anyone unfamiliar with my Writing Workshop, have a read all about it and browse old workshops here, or if you’re an old hand at this you can started.)

Prompt

This week the theme is simply missing.

You can interpret this however you like. What is leaving a bit of a hole in your life at the moment? What do you feel is missing? How long have you been carrying this around and what do you think will fix it? Can it be fixed? Is it something emotional, physical, material? Can you even pin it down?

Don’t limit yourself to personal writing if you don’t want to – you could try creating an imaginary character to explore the theme, or write MISSING on a big sheet of paper, seeing what associations it brings, scribbling them down and then writing more on one of the things the word conjures up for you.

Writing Workshop: Collected Glances

Posted by Josie on Oct 10, 2011 in Creative Writing, Writing, Writing Workshop | 9 comments

I am a natural collector, a hoarder of treasures. Not things that usually cost much, thankfully, but buttons and old keys and things I find on the pavement. I can’t walk past conkers without picking them up, or especially vibrant leaves, or pebbles or snail shells – my pockets are always full, the top of my piano always a shrine to my wanderings about. Mostly I love things that look like they have a story.

With my space to myself I’m becoming a braver collector.  I dream of shelves of mis-matched tea cups, walls full of old frames with nothing in them, glass jars filled to the top with whatever I’ve thought to put in them. I want to fill my house with stories.

But if I could collect anything, if such things were possible, I would collect glances.

You know, those brief looks that people throw when they think no-one is looking. Each one a whole story in itself. And in a way, I do collect them. I watch for them and my little internal camera goes click. Some are slow and dawdling, others move so fast you would miss them to blink. You see them in the eyes of people gazing out their car windows in long queues of traffic, some vacant, lost somewhere else far away, fingers idly tapping on the steering wheels, others riddled with frowns and frustration with clenched grips at lateness and deadlines and don’t get so close, will you? You catch one in the sudden confused pause of a woman in the supermarket as she tries to remember what on earth she came in for. Another caught as a girl walks along the pavement with her arms folded around her thin chest, eyes to the floor, earphones plugged in when suddenly her eyes lift to the sky, in sudden response to the surge of a song or the line of a lyric as she flashes a smile, her whole face changing.

Writing Workshop Prompts – Collections

Posted by Josie on Oct 5, 2011 in Writing, Writing Prompts, Writing Workshop | 2 comments

I know, late again. My unpredictable timekeeping makes me interesting and enigmatic though, right? Definitely NOT annoying? You can blame the Fibro for Monday’s lateness (Josie swallowed by a post-MADS black hole, urgh) and THIS for yesterday’s (SO EXCITED) but look, I’m here I’m here!

So then. What are we going to be writing about this week?

(For anyone unfamiliar with my Writing Workshop, have a read all about it and browse old workshops here, or if you’re an old hand at this you can started.)

Prompt

This week I want to hear about your collections. (no prizes for guessing where that idea came from)

Tell me about what you hoard, what you collect. Describe it to us, what is it about the things you collect that you love and that draws you to them? Tell us stories behind the things you’ve collected. Where did they come from? Do you know their history? Describe one item, or five, or ten, or whatever you want. What would you collect if you had the spare cash?