Author: Maggie Hamand

Our intensive summer workshop starts tomorrow, and is fully booked. There are a number of people who wanted places but couldn’t get on the course this year, so I thought it would be a good idea this week to put a few of the exercises on this blog so others can join in.

This year we are running the course around objects and how they are used in fiction. Objects can act as a plot device – Hitchcock famously coined the term a ‘MacGuffin’ for that object everyone wants but not all can have – and objects can also acts as clues or foreshadow things that happen later. They can be used as a way of revealing character (what objects does your character carry in their bag/keep in their house/ collect/treasure?); as a symbol or metaphor; as a trigger for memories.

Just to get started, go around your house and find two or three interesting, unusual objects. Or pick objects from this selection here.

Describe each of these in turn. If you’re writing a story, think about which character might own this object, where it came from, what they feel about it. Write about a memory the character has which each object triggers.
Then write a short piece which links all three objects.

Happy writing!

We are running a ‘How to get Published’ session at the Groucho Club from 10.30am-5.00pm on Saturday 25th May.
The session is with CCWC founder and tutor Maggie Hamand, and Natalie Butlin from Christine Green Author’s Agents, and there will be a talk from bestselling author Gaile Parkin about the experience of publishing her successful debut novel, “Baking Cakes in Kigali”.
The morning will focus on writing a synopsis, a covering letter and how to format your manuscript, and the afternoon on how agents and publishers operate, the current publishing scene, and the talk from Gaile.
If you attend the whole day, the cost is £90, including tea and coffee, and there is an option just to attend the afternoon for £45.
Do let us know if you’d like to attend – there’s a maximum of 10 places for the whole day and 16 for the afternoon.
Email: [email protected]

Snow has fallen. Suddenly all our normal plans are suspended, events are cancelled, and we huddle indoors in front of a fire. The world has been silenced and in our back garden a pair of foxes scratch disconsolately in the snow. Even the usually noisy cars pass slowly and silently down the icy road, their engines muffled. Darkness falls, and all is still.

Write a snowy scene in your own novel. Think about how the snow might force some characters together, keep others apart. Plans might be changed, things that were going to happen might now be suspended. The coldness outside might reflect the coldness inside people’s hearts, or might instead provide a startling contrast to an inner passion. I think of Yuri Zhivago and Lara huddled together in the icy mansion at Varykino in Boris Pasternak’s magnificent novel.
If your plans have been cancelled, use this as an opportunity. Go out in the snow, walk a little, listen to the scrunching sound beneath your feet, the uncanny stillness and silence,breathe in the sharp air. And then go in and write.

Novelist Christie Watson, whose debut novel “Tiny Sunbirds Far Away” won the Costa Best First Novel Award last year, is joining us to teach an advanced course on Sunday afternoons at The Groucho Club from 27 January.
Christie recently gave our students an inspiring talk about how her novel came to be written and published and about the long and arduous path from first putting words to paper to getting the book into print.
We are delighted to have Christie joining the team and look forward very much to working with her.

Starting a new term always gives me a spurt of enthusiasm for my own writing. Perhaps it’s the sight of keen new faces or the magic of creativity which is generated in the group. Some of the exercises work so well that while I’m teaching them I’m itching to try some of them out for myself and see what comes up.
Even if you’re not signed up for a course, this is a good time in the year to get down to writing. The evenings are getting short, the weather is miserable, and there’s nothing quite so appealing as settling down for the evening with a notebook and a warm drink or a glass of wine and forgetting the outside world. After all, when you’re writing, it can be summer in your head, you can be thousands of miles away across the sea, and you can completely lose track of where you are and all the messy complications of everyday life. What could be more appealing than that?
Happy writing!

I came away to France for most of August and thought I had packed everything I needed – but as always vital things got left behind, like my swimsuit and the login and password for this blog! I thought about how we both forget the things we really need – like the swimsuit, as without my daily swim in the sea I am quite miserable – and the things that perhaps we would rather not remember, like things connected with work.
I thought about how much we can learn about a character by the things they leave behind them and the way they deal with the loss.
Write about your character forgetting things – large things, small things, important things, trivial things. How does the character deal with having lost or misplaced something? Are they irritated, distressed, angry? Does it bring something up from the past – a time when something else was lost? Do they try to immediately replace the thing, or try to do without it? What are the impacts on the story of forgetting something? Small actions in fiction can have enormous consequences, both for the characters and the plotline.

It’s hard to avoid thinking of sport at the moment, so why not use this Olympic fortnight as an opportunity to think about your character’s relationship with sport. Do they play any sport? Work out at the gym? Support a team or player? Or are they one of those people who just can’t stand sport of any kind? Think back to your character’s schooldays – were they good at sport or did they hate it? Or like some sports but not others?
Your task this week is to write a scene which shows your character either playing, watching, or talking about sport. Then write a scene of a memory of taking part in some sporting activity as a child. How do these two scenes relate to one another? Think about how you can reveal different aspects of your character through the sport they play or don’t play, and how this can reveal, for example, the ambitions of parents, the rivalry between friends, the fear of failure.
Think, too, of all the unusual sports we’ve seen in action during the Olympic Games – you don’t have to choose the more obvious sports such as football or tennis or swimming, your character could play hockey or have taken up archery or canooing – this could give them some real individuality. And if you’re writing sci-fi or fantasy, why not have fun making up your own sport for your characters, with its own rules and language.

A few days ago, as the rain bucketed down and drenched people ran across the pavements for shelter, a bus drove past with a big poster on its side: ‘We are in drought.’ Newspapers have made much of the ‘wettest drought in history’ and this contradiction made me reflect on the use of paradox in poetry and prose – paradox being defined as ‘two opposing or contradictory statements made at the same time.’ Some phrases came to mind: Henry Vaughan’s ‘deep and dazzling darkness’ in his poem ‘The Night,’ Milton’s ‘Darkness Visible,’ and the wonderful use of paradox in John Donne’s Holy Sonnet IX: ‘for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.’
Paradox is an immensely powerful tool which can give great poetic effect and also help you to find hidden depths in your characters. There is something paradoxical in all human behaviour. A character wants to be rich but turns down an opportunity to make money for some reason they don’t understand. Or they reject the person they love. They spend the whole novel trying to achieve something only to throw it away at the end. They appear happy and secure but are really concealing an explosive secret which will blow several lives apart.
Think of some paradoxes and contradictions in your own story, and really make them work for you.

After nearly five years teaching on the CCWC, Shaun Levin is sadly leaving us. Shaun’s teaching has been nothing short of inspirational and both the teaching team and the students will miss his knowledge, dedication, and his constructive and sensitive feedback. We wish Shaun all the very best for the future.

We are lucky to have joining us Naomi Wood, author of debut novel The Godless Boys (Picador, 2011). Naomi’s first steps into fiction writing were taken on our original course in April 2006 and she was so inspired she went on to take the famous Creative Writing Masters at the University of East Anglia, where she now teaches and is working for a PhD. Naomi will be teaching an advanced workshop on Monday evenings from the autumn and also on our original course on Saturday afternoons.