New Year, New Term

Happy New Year everyone. I hope you all enjoyed the festive season.
I am looking forward to seeing members back to start Creative Writing Sessions on Friday 11 January 2013 and hope to fit in eight sessions before my next trip to UK for my routine monitoring in March.
I am planning to get you all doing a bit more actual writing this term.

We are going to start working from visual stimuli and then discuss what I am sure will be our varied responses, the styles we have chosen and the relationship between the stimulus, the style/genre/mood and other factors which influence our writing.
We will be doing some descriptive writing but hopefully describing mood and action rather than just appearance or a visual object/scene and using language other than adjectives effectively to enhance good description.
I plan to try writing about the same topic in different ways and different styles, keeping the original topic headings simple and brief to allow maximum personal choice and free association.
We will also be looking at adverbs. The received wisdom is that we should keep them to a minimum. Like many things, the are more effective and have more impact, when not overused.

If you have read and enjoyed something over the holidays, or have a favourite book that you would like to share please feel free to bring along your  recommendation and if possible bookmark/highlight a passage that exemplifies the style or gives a flavour of the story; half a page to a page in length should be enough. Recommending a book should be about explaining the style and peaking curiosity and interest, not about giving away too much of the plot!