Creative Writing

Thinking about it, this post is going to be slightly ironical. I've not written to this blog for the best part of 9 months, and the topic of this post is about writing. Funny, no?

Anyway, I've decided to re-kindle an old passion of mine: writing. I used to write quite a bit in my teens and later. I wrote for the school newspaper, the student periodical of my student union and even had one of my cyberpunk stories published in a fairly respectable disc magazine (ST-News). Most notoriously though, I wrote long streams of nonsense (some might call that 'stream-of-conciousness') for so-called 'scrolltexts', used in demos on the Atari ST.

But after that, it seemed that my muse must have flown off with some other needy teenager, as my writing all but dried up. I still read voraciously, but in recent years that too has dwindled, to the point that I probably have more than 10 books on the go at any given point but don't seem to finish any of them.

Having said that, I do still find an outlet of my creative urges in infrequent play-by-post roleplaying games I play. Some of them allow me the freedom to write scenes where my protagonist is involved, but having some freedom to use the other characters as well. The game I played in most recently (and again, this is a while back) - based on the 'Amber' novels by Roger Zelazny - was a very enjoyable romp through all kinds of fantasy tropes, where my character ended up romantically involved with a werewolf-princess.

So after I got confronted with one of my earliest writings recently, something inside me clicked. 'I used to write!' it seemed to shout. 'I want to do that again!'

And why not?

In true web 2.0 style I went off to find the best online writing courses, but they all seemed... well, too impersonal. Luckily the UK has a great tradition of adult-learning these days, so after some help from my colleagues, I found that the local adult learning centre does a 10-week creative writing course!

It starts in 2 weeks' time and will hopefully re-kindle the flame I once had for writing. But I did ask myself, what do I actually want to get out of this? What is it that I think I need to learn to write, and what end results do I think I can reasonably achieve after doing this course?

What I'd like to learn is:

• Plot creation
• Dialogue construction
• Finding inspiration

And what about practical applications?

• Coming up with plots for role-playing campaigns
• Writing better quality play-by-post entries
• Possibly writing whole role-playing modules
• And of course writing a (sci-fi/fantasy) novel at some point

I know that some of those goals are of the 'lofty' persuasion, but I do seem to remember that when I was in 'the zone' for writing, I had a similar ecstatic feeling to what I feel when I'm in a programming 'zone'.

I fully intend to keep a running journal on this blog of what the lessons were like and what kind of writing results come out of this, so stay tuned! There might be some good stuff!