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 clients 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.

As I was clearing my desk in a ‘back to school’ frenzy at the end of August, I found some old testimonials that people had written and they touched my heart. There’s nothing more motivating that being reminded that people value your work. I guess that’s one reason that, however tired I sometimes feel, I keep doing what I do. Here’s some of things people wrote:

“These workshops take me out of the mundane necessity of life. They’re islands of time in which the mind can be free.’

“Stick to the theme or go off on your own little journey. It doesn’t matter.”

“I never know what’s going to come out onto the page and I’m always pleasantly surprised.”

“A brilliant melting pot of words and ideas in a decicious stew. Great for seeds of ideas, to evolve a new idea, to get hear other’s styles and to get feedback and guidance.”

The surprise element came through strongly in the comments I was reading and I realised that this is what I love about workshops too. I never know what I’m going to write, and so many stories and poems have begun in the melting pot of a workshop both for myself and for my clients. Sometimes my workshops can feel simple, trivial even. I spend barely any time at all planning these days and give very little guidance. We laugh a lot and write a lot of fripperies that go nowhere. But I’ve also seen writers develop their voices in those workshops, improve their skills and sometimes, write whole novels piece by piece in those little islands of times. Seeds take root and grow, just as my writers grow too. “After today’s workshop, I felt transformed and open to new possibilities,” wrote one client and I marvelled at the power of sitting around a table or on a zoom screen playing with words.

Sometimes Ideas seem to leap from one head to another, to link arms and form stories that pass from one pen to another, as if they’re just floating in the air waiting to be captured, as if we’re all drawing from the same invisible well. No-one who has ever been present in one my workshops could question the idea of the collective consciousness or the element of wizardry at work. It’s so much more than just writing. If Liz Gilbert hadn’t already written Big Magic then I would, because magic is only word for what takes place.

Last week, in our ‘back to school’ workshops, we were writing about ‘Firsts’. As I often do, I produced a playlist for people to write from and, on Monday, I found myself writing from the song title, ‘First day of my life.’ As I picked up my pen, I had no idea what i was going to write about but I found myself describing a character who is in soul form and on the brink of reincarnation. It’s not at all the kind of thing I normally write and I didn’t give it another thought until I wrote on the same theme in my Wednesday workshop. This time, I took the challenge of cramming all of the song titles into one piece: first love, the first time ever I saw your face, do you remember the first time? It brought out a romantic element (my favoured territory) but the other idea was in the background and as I finished writing I was struck with the realisation that this was the seed of my next novel. Something that had been lying dormant took root. I’m still finishing another project but I’m excited now about the next novel.

Alex wrote about a first too. For many months she’s been using the workshops as a place to add segments to her YA novel. A lot of my writers do this. Any theme can help to develop character or place, plot or back story and she’s amassed a lot of words in those workshops. Last Wednesday, she read us her piece and then looked up with a mildly astonished look on her face. “I think I’ve just found the ending to my book,” she said. She hadn’t just written about firsts; she’d written the last page of her novel.

Sometimes I meet writers who think they don’t need workshops. They have serious projects to get on with. I respect that. At some point you just have to knuckle down to the hard work of crafting a novel or a poem and workshops can be a form of procrastination and a diversion from the main goal; constantly creating new beginnings and never finishing anything is a hazard for the workshop attendee. But, overall, I believe workshops can make the hard work easy. Old projects are rekindled and new projects are born week on week in my workshops. Lost pieces of jigsaws and plot lines are found from the random prompts that I casually toss in the direction of the attendees.

Stories aren’t the only thing that are found though. Writers discover soulmates and a community in my workshops too. People find support as they journey through grief, hardship and heartahce. They build friendships. Dare I say, they find love. And sometimes, more often than not, they find lost parts of themselves, parts that had been discarded long ago. And what a gift and a privilege to watch that process.

And so, I ended my first week back at work with a new novel idea and the knowledge that I make a difference in my own frivolous way. How lucky I am that this is my job.

If you’d like to experience the magic first-hand, you can join on Mondays via Zoom for Writing Lunch Break and on Wednesdays in-person in Get Writing at The Writers Workshop.