Write With Me Club: April
The theme this month is place
Happy Easter everybody! I hope you all had a lovely time. Did you fill yourselves with chocolate yesterday?
Last week, staring down the barrel of a long weekend working, I made a decision to actually hang up my laptop and spent the weekend tackling the TBR (To Be Read) pile beside my bed. I put it on Notes the other day and some of you shared yours too. For those who would like to get more from the Substack experience, and use Notes and Chat and Direct Messaging, as well as being able to listen to audio readings of posts turning them into a podcast you can listen to on walks etc, I recommend you download the Substack App.
Anyway, back to my TBR pile, here it is in all its glory:
Although, now I come to think of it, I’ve only read two that are in that pile, Green Dot by Madeleine Gray, and Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh. I also read Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy which is out of shot because, yes, I have another pile on the floor beside my bed too.
And, because obviously I don’t have enough books waiting to be read already, I actually nipped out and bought another Clear by Carys Davies.
I should have finished reading this last one by tonight’s Write With Me Club because yes, here we have arrived again on the first Monday of the month and that means we shall be gathering (via zoom) around my kitchen table tonight for our monthly meet.
This month’s theme is PLACE. And I have been thinking of that whilst reading these four books over Easter and I’ll be discussing how relevant it has been in them, as well as sharing other thoughts and exercises on place.
But of course place is not only important in fiction, but absolutely vital in non-fiction.
If any of you got round to reading my most recent piece What If We Could Go Back, you will recognise that without the descriptions of house I grew up in, it just wouldn’t have had the same heft.
Often place is a character in itself, it is one of the first decisions that you need to make when starting any piece of writing – where is this situated? We think of time – are we in the present looking back, or writing as we experience – but we also must think where are we situating our reader in place, and vitally why? Why there? Why not somewhere else? How does setting add to our work?
My debut novel The Imposter was set in the Fens for good reason, and I’ll discuss that with you tonight. Plus I’ll talk about place in other books that I’ve written and how important that was.
For new subscribers, my monthly creative chat takes place on the first Monday of every month from 7pm-8pm GMT. And at Midday on that day, I send out the zoom details for my paid subscribers, and so below is all you need to join.
I look forward to seeing many of you later for some creative chat about place…