Last month's night of intuitive drawing reminds me that perhaps the best thing I have done for my writing was to go to a set of creative workshops that were full of little missions. The workshops were devised and run by Jean Dark AKA Bella Basura. Reading even a little bit of the Jean Dark or the Bella Basura websites you get the idea of how experimental and innovative she is. For example there is a play set in a future where Shakespeare spliced with 80s junk advert tag lines and with 'vehicle reversing' and with 'unexpected item in the bagging area' is AIs best guess at high literature, a story of a filthy old flat being inspected by a council worker who's mind turns to his bike pump and story written from the point of view of a podiatrist on a first date with a movie star who is perfect in every way except for her blessed feet.
In the creative workshops we did things like taking a card from a deck of tarot and a picture from a stack Jean had printed and combined the two in a tale, we took a twisty path to Cherry Hinton Hall Park and wrote about the journey and at the end of the course we put together a night of readings at the Edge cafe and sold hand made anthologies of the work.
I found some of my writing from the time of the course. This is a true story that I titled Silver woman:
When I think about it, the main places I've seen her are around the homeless shelter. She is as curved as a letter 'C' and all silver: thin silver hair framing her round face, silvery coat with no skirt underneath, just her sturdy bare legs with slip-on shoes, even her skin seems silvery or shimmery somehow. Sometimes she has a plastic bag bulging with bread from the bakery. Do they give her that at the end of the day? The stuff they would otherwise throw away? Sometimes she is completely drenched in rain sitting in the park, glimmering in the grey. In all the times I've seen her she's never been asking for money. That's not to say she doesn't. I did see her several times when I was living in a flat on a traffic island. There were a couple of crossings to get to my flat, over busy traffic and she often stood at the crossing and asked me if I'd help her cross. It was on my way so I obliged. I wondered if this was some sort of scam as she looped her arm through mine and we went, ever so slowly, together over the zebra crossing and then the next crossing in silence and then she went on her way. It happened several times after that. Just looping arms, walking silently, then on her way. I saw her from my kitchen window doing the same routine with other people. As the kettle boiled I wondered: does she just want to be close to someone, is it simply that?
The workshops really fuelled my own writing missions and challenges. Some of my writing has sprung from a fascination with little bits of science, with the powder-fine grains of words that come from beyond our senses. I got one of my favourite stories from collecting 'and finally' stories read at the end of the news. I give myself the challenge to put something that is an interface between the atmosphere and the land or sea in my stories. For example the frost flowers in the tale of the Arctic fox and the oxygen in layers of sea sediment in the West Runton Mammoth. It is just a simple thing, but it comes about because if I'm going to make a world for things to happen in, it will be a world that has an atmosphere.
The point of these creative games, I remember Jean saying, is to trick your brain. Writing so often feels weighty, maybe because it is a very special thing to do, but the trick is to feel as if none of those weighty things exist, to be more natural, more carefree and playful and open up the possibility of who knows what might happen next.