I will write when I have one of these…

Last year I attempted the Open University A215 Creative Writing course. My motivation for doing it was to try to kickstart my writing, and to develop a writing habit. Did it work? Well, I’m still un-decided. To be fair, I don’t think that I gave the course the commitment that it needed. At the time it began, I’d just started a new job and, let’s face it, I was in a state of apathy with my writing. In the end, I just didn’t give it the time that it deserved - I turned in the assignments (usually right up to the wire) but I really didn’t do any of the background reading or exercises inbetween. So, I didn’t help myself.

Obviously, your own commitment to a course like that is key, but I also think that a lot depends on your tutor and their ability to inspire people in the group. When you start, you’re divided into tutor groups and allocated a chatroom - the theory being that you develop a little community and provide encouragement and support, led by the tutor. In my case, that didn’t happen. I was disheartened by the lack of engagement from the tutor and it rather set the tone for my approach to the course. However, I heard that other people in other tutor groups had good experiences, so I guess it’s the luck of the draw. And I did get some things from the course. I got:

1. a respectable tranche of short stories that I can edit and submit to magazines or competitions.
2. a little more belief in my writing ability.
3. a few ideas for writing practice.

Now, I’ve never been a big fan of writing practice, but the A215 course spends a lot of time encouraging practices like freewriting and clustering, and I did find them to be useful techniques. Setting yourself a time limit for freewriting can be liberating - it’s OK to write rubbish and you haven’t got to write for hours and at the end of the exercise, you’ve often got the germ of an idea for a story or a poem, or whatever you want to write.

Anyway, the point of this post was to talk about the lovely timer that I bought, in a bid to start freewriting again.What a splendid illustration this is of my shameless procrastination…Amazon can’t deliver it for another week and so OBVIOUSLY I can’t begin my writing practice until it arrives.