The New World

After being advised to, I joined twitter and it’s not as bad as I thought. Okay I'm lying. It's awesome. I love it. I love how I can follow people who are interested in writing and contact them, whereas on Facebook I would never have had the chance to come across these people. A new world of writers and writing opportunities has been opened up to me. I've always been told that the life of a writer is lonely, but from what I've discovered that's only if you want it to be. Nowadays there are so many ways to meet like-minded people and share your goals and progress with them.

Because of Twitter I am now attempting to write poetry. Poetry was one of those things in school that I appreciated and liked reading, but could never imagine myself picking up a pen and doing, and it turns out that there may be a reason for that; because I can't write good poetry.  Up until two days ago the only poems I'd managed to come up with seemed shallow and desperate, but I persevered and I now have a semi-finished poem. Poetry, like all forms of writing, is something that anyone can do once they know the basics, and it turns out there's more to poetry then rhythm, rhyme and tone. Since trying to come back to poetry, I’ve rediscovered the poetic devices like Similes, Metaphors, Hyperbole, Personification, Onomatopoeia, Assonance etc. With these devices in mind, I think I’m on my way to writing a decent poem. Once this one is finished I think it will be a lot easier to write more, especially as I feel more confident with the process now.

 I managed to find a Poetry competition online and the deadline is 31st December, so I'm aiming to have written five poems and submit them to this. Also the Writing Magazine runs a lot of competitions (https://www.writers-online.co.uk/News/Win_cash_prizes_and_publication_in_our_new_creative_writing_competitions/), though only some are open to people who don’t buy the actual magazine. I’m considering getting a subscription so I can enter all the competitions and read up on the interesting articles.

My creative writing class yesterday was particularly interesting. Our guest speaker was Ian Skillicorn the founder of http://www.shortstoryradio.com/  and http://www.nationalshortstoryweek.org.uk. He had some gems of advice on short story writing and the majority of it were things I hadn’t thought of before, such as the plot for a short story shouldn’t be complex; if it's complex then it might be better being a novel. Also you shouldn’t have more than two characters in a scene at the same time as it gets confusing. When planning a novel you always attempt to make your characters the most well rounded and true to life characters possible, but with short stories your characters, other than your protagonist, don’t need to be like this, they just need to successfully complete the function they were created for.

So my aims for writing this weekend are as following:

1. Finish my first poem
2.  Write at least one more 
3. If I have time, try and start writing a short story.

So I have a busy and stressful weekend planned, including all the revision I need to do for university, but with the cold setting in and the advent doors on my calendar opening, I feel to jolly to care.