November Theme & Meeting

The next meeting in Royal Botanic Gardens will be at 10:30am on Saturday 11th November. We expect to go to about 12:30pm.

We thought we'd try a theme based on an image this time. The image is shown below. You can view a larger version of it here.

The idea is to contemplate the image for a little while (perhaps do the relaxation exercises described by Catherine Fargher?). See what sort of overall or dominant impression comes to mind and use that to do a stream of consciousness or mind-map/clustering until some idea emerges that you want to write about. Then write your poem, story, essay, etc based on the inspiration you may have got this way.

Well that's just one approach - use whatever inspires you to write! It will be very interesting to see the different ideas the picture can evoke.

When you've revised or refined it, feel free to post it to the blog, and bring it along to the next meeting in the park.

By the way, the image is from the site ashes and snow, and the photograph by Gregory Colbert. Visit the site - it may inspire you all by itself!

Nebulous Poem - from Vergil

This is my contribution to the Nebulous theme. This poem uses the "cinquain" pattern, where each verse has 5 lines, and there is a specific number of syllables per line. The first line has 2 syllables, then 4, 6, 8 and finally 2 syllables per line respectively.
(It's easy and I don't have to rhyme it!)

Cloudy,
Floating through the
Day, feeling nebulous,
Misty, light-headed and listless,
Thinking.

Thinking,
Dreaming about
Nothing and everything,
Gazing at faces and hoping
For you.

For you
Just might appear
Out of the blue, just like
It happened to me the day when
You left.

You left
Without warning
Not even a note of
Goodbye; and now all I feel is
Cloudy

Cloudy,
Floating through the
Day, feeling nebulous,
Misty, light-headed and dreaming
Of you.

First Monthly get together - Nebulous theme

Our first meeting was on October 14th, with the theme "Nebulous". This time we had Larissa, Cathy, Pam & Vergil. This was that really hot Saturday, so we managed to find a lovely shady spot under a spreading fig tree, whose low hanging branches gave us a kind of private space, while keeping the sweeping view of our magificent Sydney Harbour and the Opera House. Each of us read our pieces, followed by a discussion of each one.

Update: For our next theme, I will post an image which can be used as an inspiration for a vignette, story, essay, scene from a play or poem - whatever it might inspire. I'll post it here shortly.

Welcome!

Welcome to our Budding Writers Blog! The aim is to provide a simple way for us all to post our writing samples, provide helpful comments and constructive criticism, and also provide links to useful writing resources. We'll also post details of our next meeting times and "homework" theme to keep us motivated for the next get together. If you can't make it to a monthly meeting in the Botanic Gardens, then you can still post your writing here anyway!

Let's see how it goes ...