Create Your New Year 2025
I’m not sure when or where it started, but it feels like I’ve always made a collage around New Year. An ex-boyfriend tells me that I introduced him to my New Year collages back in the late 1990s so I must have been doing it for at least twenty years. Way before I became a coach, I was already interested in being the architect of my own life and saw that there was a value in spending time reflecting on what I wanted. And what better time to reflect on that than at New Year? So I began using words and images to create a vision for how I wanted my future to look. For the last 2 years I’veI shared the experience as a workshop and, at the start of 2020, I’m looking forward to presenting the workshop at Kollider from where I’ve been running the Writers Hub in 2019.
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Twas the night before Christmas
‘You had one job!’ she shouted, her rosy cheeks glowing from the oven’s heat. ‘I wrote the lists, I bought the presents, I even set up the GPS. I’ve packed the bags and loaded up the carriage. I fed the reindeer and sprinkled the sleigh with magic dust. I’ve got dinner in the slow cooker and the veg are all chopped ready for when you get home from work. All you had to do was putting on a chuffing red suit (which, by the way, muggins here laundered and pressed for you) and stay sober enough to drive and you couldn’t even do that!’
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Focus on the throw
My son is learning to juggle at the moment. I’ve always felt that circus was his calling and it’s such a thrill to watch him apply himself to something that he really loves to do. It’s even more exciting because he’s combining several things that he loves in one act; the boy they call Hatter, is now juggling hats alongside the balls!
But what’s this got to do with writing?
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Write about Grief and Loss - Friday - Memorials, Ashes and Funerals
Memorials, ashes and funerals
Planning funerals and memorials gives us something to do in our grief and is an important way to honour our loved ones. It can be really comforting to have a special place to visit whether it’s a grave or a bench or a tree, or simply the place that ashes were scattered. It can also be a bit of a minefield as different relatives have different associations with the person who died and each one might think they know best. There can also be a lot of red tape to go through.
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Write about Grief and Loss - Thursday - Finding Comfort in Grief
Things that bring comfort
I spent at least the first eight months of my own grief mostly feeling desolate and filled with anger at the unfairness of life and struggling with my loneliness. I think it's fine to write about these things but one of the things that I found helpful (and continue to find helpful) was to also write about the fact that I had known great love and to try to keep that feeling of love with me.
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Write about Grief and Loss - Wednesday - The Langauge of Loss
I’m a writer so I’m really fascinated by language and especially the language that we use for death, dying and loss. We have so many euphemisms for death, from the gentle (‘he passed on’) to the humorous (‘he kicked the bucket’) and personally, I think this is because we’re so afraid to talk honestly about death and grief.
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Write about Grief and Loss - Tuesday - Memories
Memories.
In grief, we are swamped with memories. Sometimes it can feel too much to remember everything about our loved ones and our time with them but, over time, memories can also become comforting - evidence that they lived and were loved and that they touched and shaped our lives.
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Write about Grief and Loss - Monday - The things they left behind.
The things they left behind - Writing about objects
In loss, I find objects take on a new symbolism. They come to represent the people who have gone and they remind us of the love we shared. In the weeks, months and years following a loss, we have a lot of decisions to make about which things to keep and which things to let go, about which things are significant and which things unnecessary. We agonise over what to do with clothes, ashes, wedding rings. All of it, I feel, is part of a process of trying to make sense of what has happened.
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Walking the trauma tightrope
I feel abnormally ‘griefy’ this spring and, as I write this, I’m not entirely sure why. Nothing really bad is happening and I haven’t experienced any recent loss but I feel my grief radar is dialled up to a hundred and I’m on the lookout for sadness. I’m hypervigilant, my trauma is being constantly triggered and, though I’m not formally diagnosed, it’s clear to me that I have PTSD from some of the experiences I’ve been through. Add in an adjustment to my HRT, menopause and other health issues and I’m feeling decidedly wobbly. The body keeps the score they say and there’s no question that my body is a repository of all of the awful experiences I’ve had. They’re seeping out now in arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome, exhaustion and pain. I’ve had hypermboility syndrome and allergies for years, but now I’m floored by too much exertion and I react to so many foods that sometimes it feels like it’s barely worth even trying to eat. I can’t tolerate alochol at all so drinking myself into oblivion is not an option. I’m also slowly coming to the realisation that I’m probably neurodivergent which adds to the conglomeration of things I’m struggling with but, currently, my nerves are all of a jangle and I feel permanently in the grip of anxiety or on the verge of tears. It’s not a great deal of fun and it’s all made harder by the fact that I find it so hard to write about.
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Write about Grief and Loss - a writing series with BBC Radio Sheffield
I began writing about grief eight years ago when my partner, Blacksmith Paul, died very suddenly in traumatic circumstances. I say ‘partner’ as shorthand, but we’d only been seeing each for some vague period of six-eight months and the definition of our relationship was similarly vague. What matters is that we loved each other deeply and that losing him was devastating.
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Where do you get inspiration from?
Following on from the triumphant success of The Writers Workshop’s Writers Day - Write More in ‘24 - we’re sharing prompts to keep you writing, and to get you thinking and sharing your process. Our focus for April is all about trying new things and also about where we get inspiration from as writers, so I thought I’d share my own thoughts around this. Firstly, I’m going to make a confession - it’s not other writers!
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A pitch in time – my personal reflections from the pitching sessions at Write More in ‘24
In some ways it can be a mixed blessing to be at the helm of The Writers Workshop. There’s a risk of being seen as a project manager instead of as a writer, the host of an event rather than the main attraction. Like many in our community, I’m still waiting for my big break as a writer, and sometimes it’s frustrating that I can’t pitch my own work at our events when I’d like to! But, on the other hand, it’s an honour and a privilege to nurture so many other writers, and I get to revel vicariously in their successes. There are also perks such as being backstage with agents and publishers, having access to their direct inboxes and their thoughts. Saturday was one of those days when I felt the pros and cons of both my role and being an aspiring novelist most keenly.
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Best foot forward - establishing a new year writing practice
I’m currently planning my Get Writing workshop for tomorrow and my head is full of proverbs and sayings, which is the theme of the workshop. Best foot forward, swallow the frog, the early bird catches the worm - these are the ones that stand out to me as a writer who is often preoccupied with how to create and maintain a writing practice. I’m particularly obsessed with mornings at the moment. We all know that a good morning routine sets us up for a good day, but it’s hard with two kids to get to school, a huge to do list and an iphone full of distractions. Do I swallow the frog and make those annoying phone calls about tax returns and insurance first thing, or do I sit quietly in the pre-dawn hours, drafting my novel? Maybe both if I get up early enough! But do I want to get up at 5am in January with a virus? Maybe not.
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Where the magic happens
I restarted my regular workshops last week. it was lovely to be back after a break. At the end of term, I was flagging a bit and wondering if I had any more workshops in me. I’ve been running weekly workshops for almost a decade and have people who’ve been coming for the whole of that time. Some of them must have been to around 500 workshops and sometimes I wonder what on earth I can do next. There are only so many themes to write about and so many ways to present them and yet, however simple and repetitive the exercises are, people keep coming back. And so do I. This week I found myself wondering why.
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Time in a bottle
I went away for a weekend last week with my partner. We’ve been together now for seven months and hardly ever spent more than a few hours together. He’s been caring for his mum (who is recently settled in a home) and I have two children who are solely dependent on me, so time together is rare and precious. Being away for forty-eight hours was heavenly. As we sat dueting on our ukuleles with a view devoid of people and filled with grass and sea and sky, the words of Jim Croce’s song, ‘Time in a Bottle’, resonated with a force I’d never felt before:
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For Grant - my online friend
I learned this week that a dear friend has died. Our friendship existed almost solely in online spaces but he was an important person in my life for a while. I’ve written more about the difficulties of grieving for an online friend in a blog that will be shared on The Huffington Post later in the summer but, for now, a poem.
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The show must go on - My Message in a Bottle monologue
Mum says it’s like a circus when she comes round here. Bright lights and squealing, kids running wild. That’s what she means. She thinks I don’t have them under control. Not like she did. Ringmaster. Lion tamer.
He’s on her side. The strong man in his big top. Comes home asking why the chairs are balanced like acrobats in a heap, can’t see the mountain or the den they made. He complains about the glitter in the cracks in the kitchen table, doesn’t look at what we’ve conjured from scraps and glue.
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Plot Twist! Reacting to challenges. (My talk for SHU writing students)
This week I was asked to talk to students at Sheffield Hallam University about how I have kept writing in the face of so many challenges. It was a great event and an interesting experience to talk about my whole writing journey. I don’t normally prepare for a presentation by writing but, on this occasion I did, so I thought I might as well share my talk here for those who weren’t able to attend. Hopefully there’s something in there to help you on your own way.
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The Write Mindset
Many people have an idea of what a writer’s life looks like and, if you spend your time on Instagram (instead of writing), you might be forgiven for believing that a writer’s life is all beautiful desks, fluffy companions, book launches and parties, leather-bound notebooks in cafes and time spent wandering lonely as a cloud seeking inspiration from daffodils and reservoirs, maybe including a quick jog or a cold-water swim for good measure. All of these stereotypes are valid and true. Personally, I like a desk, a pretty notebook and a cold water swim as much as anyone. But what of the words? If you have the right amount of coffee and the correct balance of sunshine and solitude, do they just flow? Or is the other image, of the tortured arist suffering penniless in his or her garret also still a thing in 2023?
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The perils and pitfalls of feedback
I’ve been reflecting on the value of feedback as a writer recently. Partly because I’ve been asking for and receiving readers’ impressions on the second draft of my work in progress and partly because I’ve been involved in reviewing mentoring applications for the Off the Shelf Literature Festival as part of my role at The Writers Workshop. I’ ve been working with aspiring writers for twenty years now and I know that feedback is something writers feel desperate for. I also know that the wrong kind of feedback at the wrong time can be devastating. At various points in my own career, feedback has actually stopped me from writing and I hear this story time and time again, particularly from writers who have studied writing academically. When you’ve poured your heart and soul into a piece of work, it’s very easy to become dispirited and give up if it’s not well-recieved. And yet, without feedback, it’s really hard for us to see what’s working and what we need to improve. We can’t learn in a vacuum. How do we get the balance right? Here’s what I’ve learned.
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