Writing Courses from Janice Marriott
Out and About
Covid Contagion
Several clients have reported to me that they are suffering ‘brain fog’ and weariness after having Covid. If you are also having these enervating symptoms please don’t add to your stress by worrying about GWN deadlines. There AREN’T any deadlines other than those set by you. Write when you feel like writing, when it feels right. Don’t strain to work when your body and mind tell you they want to sleep or just cuddle up with a movie or a magazine. Go with the flow of the fog.
For the majority of us, who don’t have Covid, it is so nice to get back to workshops, and the
occasional meet and greet.
For example: I greatly enjoyed seeing Adrienne Joyce’s book developing when we met in my favourite cafe. It’s about a successful orca refloating off Mangawhai, not a million miles away from where the book about her floating house, Harry the House goes Surfing is set. While Harry the house’s surfing days are over and he is now squatting on firm foundations, Ben the Orca is out there, swimming around New Zealand. Yes, really! After his night swaddled in towels, up on the high tide line, he was successfully reunited with his mother in the ocean.
This was a life-changing experience for Adrienne , who is beside him in this photograph, and she hopes the account will make more young people aware of all the life in our oceans, and how
we can have a role being their guardians.
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The NZSA Te Puni Kaituhi o Aotearoa appoints a President of Honour each year, from the ranks of its revered and senior members. Tessa Duder’ is the current President of Honour and one of her duties is to deliver the Janet Frame Memorial Lecture, about the state of the literary sector.
I decided it was a sufficiently important event for me to use as my first venture into Auckland’s CBD since Covid arrived here! The venue was the Old Government Building 24 Princes Street, on the University of Auckland campus. iMaps didn’t understand the higgledy piggledy nature of the university buildings, scattered among unlit bush on a steep slope between Princess and Symonds
Street. And nor did I. I stumbled down from Princes St on a root-rutted track that felt a bit like the Pinnacles track in the Coromandel I’d accomplished a few weeks before, but not in the dark.
Leaves rustled, bushes bent and a paraplegic woman in a wheelchair burst through and apologised for nearly running me over. I was so impressed! She was so sure-wheeled compared to me. I asked
her for directions and she reassured me I did have to continue on down and I’d find it. Off she spun and I turned back to scrambling. I arrived on a proper path. Three sets of people I subsequently
encountered knew nothing of an Old Government Building. Finally I found the building and the lecture hall, and Tessa’s speech was a call to arms. You can hear it on the NZSA website. It was a
pleasure to be recognised by some GWN clients there too, one of whom was dreading her dark climb up to Princess Street again so we managed it together and found a much easier route. And my
brightly lit up bus arrived without my having to wait.
There’s no message to this anecdote. It’s just a way of showing you that events are now happening, all round the country, and although it seems difficult to break out of our isolation and take the risk and go to talks and meetings, don’t let unexpected difficulties put you off. Socialising with other writers is always worth it, even if your shoes are covered in mud.
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Upcoming Events
Storylines, the national children’s literature organisation is holding a hui for illustrators and writers in Auckland in July this year. There will be a range of keynote speakers, author and illustrator
sessions and workshops, plenty that beginners will find interesting, and a special literary high tea on the Saturday evening. The whole event is always welcoming and informative.
For details
https://www.storylines.org.nz/events-and-activities/storylines-hui-2022/
Mark it in your calendar
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Memoir workshop
In August I’m giving a Saturday morning workshop about memoir writing. The focus will be on writing anecdotes, accounts of something that has happened to you, and shaping these for a wider
audience.
My workshops are always a great opportunity for participants to mix and mingle with other people who are doing the same thing, and also to meet me if you haven’t already.
Location: Parnell Public Library, Jubilee Building, Parnell Road, Auckland.
Date: August 20.
Exact time to be divulged later.
I’ll add more details next time. This is just a ‘mark the date’ indicator.
You do not have to be a GWN client to attend. Bring a friend if you’d like to.
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Deadlines for competitions
The Sargeson prize is one of the highly regarded short story competitions.
Entries open from 1 April – 30 June 2022
Visit waikato.ac.nz/go/sargeson-prize for all the details.
The Margaret Mahy Illustration Prize is one of New Zealand’s leading illustration awards with close to a thousand entries since its inception. The 2021 Illustration prize winner, Minrui Yang, reimagined Margaret Mahy’s previously unillustrated There’s a King in the Cupboard, which will be published in August. This year, the Margaret Mahy Illustration Prize creates a unique opportunity for an unpublished New Zealand-based illustrator to showcase Mahy’s The Witch in the Cherry Tree, originally published almost 50 years ago.
Deadline: Thursday 28 July.
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It IS possible!
If you are a writer who wants to achieve publication and recognition please take note of the results of the Michael Gifkins/Text Publishing Award. When I read the list of prize winners (results are
online) I noticed that of the four novelists shortlisted none had long publishing histories. Three haven’t published a novel before! Two are students. Lesson here: It IS possible. Keep going.
Don’t give up.
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Two clients this month have embarked on what I call GWN ‘mix and mingle courses.’ A little pinch of children’s, a sprinkling of poetry, and some prose essays or anecdotes or letters. I’ve found it interesting putting together these tailor- made courses. Remember that a defining concept behind Go Write Now is flexibility. Everyone is unique so of course your learning requirements are unique too. I wouldn’t be tutoring if it was repetitive and same-y.
Never take rejection personally.
A publisher is only ever thinking about whether your script will fit within his or her publishing programme.
Questions from this month
“I have a question, that might be interesting for your readers in the newsletter. My daughter has a real love of writing (10). She is currently getting really in to it and writing beautifully. I love it but also see some guidance I could give her in terms of flow and editing. The question is, do I say anything or just let her write? As a teacher too I find it hard to hold back as if it was a student in my class I would critique it (thoughtfully and encouragingly of course). My gut tells me not to though.”
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Poems of the Month
2 poems this month, one humorous, one not. Both contain plenty to think about.
Apologia by Connie Bensley
My life is too dull and too careful –
even I can see that:
the orderly bedside table,
the spoilt cat.
Surely I should have been bolder.
What could biographers say?
She got up, ate toast and went shopping
day after day?
Whisky and gin are alarming,
Ecstasy makes you drop dead.
Toy boys make inroads on cash
and your half of the bed.
Emily Dickinson, help me.
Stevie, look up from your Aunt.
Some people can stand excitement,
some people can’t.
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How It All Started. by Catherine Smith
Do you know this dream? An exam room
full of neat, serious girls, your lucky gonk
by your fountain pen, the plop of tennis balls
through an open window. You’re here for
‘O’ level history on The Causes
Of The First World War but you’ve no idea –
too busy bunking off to watch Crown Court,
and the teacher says You may turn over
and begin and there’s a question
on the Algeciras crisis and all you can think is,
Algeciras sounds like a virus or a cloud formation,
your eyes blur, scanning for something
you understand, you wonder who Bismark was,
why his web of Alliances was so significant,
your throat swells like a new loaf, you watch
the girls who know the answers to these things,
and you think of the stutter of gunfire, a soldier’s
booted foot lying in a puddle, how the leather split,
how the rest of him wasn’t there, just a stump
of bone, and if you’d learned how it all started,
you might have known how to prevent this.
You should have known how to prevent this.
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This month write poems that say something meaningful for everyone.
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Hot Hint for the Month
Apply the Have-We-Got-A-Story test?
In a story something needs to happen that changes the characters and the situation.
To test whether your story has something happening in it, apply this test.
- Write the beginning paragraph of a story.
- Underneath it, write the final paragraph.
- Look at them together.
- Read them in sequence
Ask yourself:
- Has anything important changed between the beginning and the end?
- Have the characters changed?
- Has the situation changed?
I hope the answer to these questions is Yes.
If not enough has happened in your story it won’t hold a reader’s interest.
This quick test, comparing first and last paragraphs, is often done by editors when looking at
unsolicited manuscripts. They aren’t going to read the middle of the story unless they know
something has changed.
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Quotes to inspire
“The poetic impulse … is more like a desire to separate a piece of one’s experience and set it up on
its own; … in the absence of this impulse, nothing stirs.” – Philip Larkin, Letters to Monica.
“The first time I heard the phrase ‘writing workshop’ I remember thinking of the carpentry room at
school… Did you have to go somewhere special to do it? Was there a retail outlet?” – Hugo
Williams.
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janice@gowritenow.nz
www.janicemarriott.com
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