I attended a writing workshop the other day, in Sutton library run by Rachel Sambrook. It was pretty good & I was impressed by how well attended it was. We had some exercises to do but the first one was simply introducing ourselves. There was my friend Richard & I, a couple of others who’d written quite a bit, and the rest were just beginners.
I was all prepared with my laptop to arrive & work on my book, it was a writing class after all. But then we were given a couple of writing exercises that were pretty good. One was writing a list of failures, as one of the points Rachel made that there were no real failures in writing, & this is true especially when you’re starting out – don’t focus on the pressure to have something that works straight away. Then after a couple more exercises we did some free writing.
After the workshop we went to Nandos, and one of the participants who was very friendly joined us. This really impressed me actually because it’s not easy to just meet new random people, especially as the workshop was only an hour during lunch time. So the 3 of us ended up in Nandos, and Aridja turned out to be just starting out as a vlogger. She got her camera out & started recording about meeting us & having Nandos, and she came across as very natural on camera. We ended up talking about Oprah, and saying who ever gets to meet her first can tell her about each other. So watch this space!