Titantic Tweets and Furious Facebooking

Well, it’s been a strange day and a long one. It started with a (virtual) Welsh Male Voice Choir in ‘Lift Up Your Hearts’ and finished with Elvis and family going to see Oliver in Jean Sutton’s traditional Monday night quiz.

In between we learned from Meg Davis (and yes, I have checked that her name is spelt correctly) how to go about getting an agent — and what we can expect that agent to do for us once we have that magic contract. We learned about tricks that don’t work (so I might as well cancel the wine and chocolates); how some writers end up writing totally different books from the ones they are contracted to write; and why an animal narrator is not a good idea. But most of all, I learned that I need to go back home and get on with the writing — Meg advised strongly us against starting the search until the novel is complete.

As a Swanwick veteran (well, a five-yearer anyway), I now allow myself some time away from the formal timetable — the second biggest mistake of white badgers is trying to go to everything, every day, leading to lack of concentration, if not exhaustion by Tuesday! I took some time out this morning and revamped the Chudleigh Phoenix website for the 2013 short story competition that has just been launched. There are flyers in the information room and full details can be found here: http://www.chudleighphoenix.co.uk/2013comp.html.

The main event today has to be the Twitter vs. Facebook debate. Della Galton proposed that tweeting was the most effective form of social media while Peter Jones fought strongly in support of FB. Despite (or maybe because of) some strong lobbying on Della’s behalf by Jane Wenham Jones, it was a close run thing. Having settled the contentious question of secret ballot vs. show of hands, the first vote was a dead heat at sixteen each. In a move reminiscent of the factory audits I used to do in my previous day-job, ‘when you don’t like the answer, you change the question’. The second vote, on the question of which is the most useful to us as writers, the score was twenty-one to twelve in favour of Twitter. In the true spirit of the age, I provided a live commentary during the debate on both Twitter and Facebook for friends unable to be with us today (and anyone who forgot to in person). I went into the room expecting to vote for FB, but at the end of the session, I was completely convinced that Twitter was faster and easier to use.

Today’s Write About was led by Eileen West who set us the task of writing about the sea in a playful non-threatening way, but also with the inclusion of the word ‘Titanic’. There were some very creative interpretations of the word, both as a noun and as an adjective. As always, I was amazed by how much can be written in a short space of time — and by the huge number of variations around a single theme or trigger.

Oh, and if anyone's wondering: the biggest mistake of white badgers is to sit at the business end of the table at mealtimes. It's my theory that the queues outside the dining hall each day are not so much about getting a table with one's friends as getting a seat away from the serving spoons. Or is that only me?

Swanwick: Scurrilous Rumours and Graphic Murders

A delegate has been caught in bed with one of the lecturers at Swanwick just minutes after an “individual tuition” session. Half the class walked out of the Enticing and Enduring the Media Course because it was so badly run and uninformative.

Neither of the above statements is true — well, the second certainly isn’t, anyway! They were just two of the ‘news stories’ our groups had to consider running in The Swanwick Standard, an imaginary newspaper invented by Simon Hall in his excellent two-parter on how to catch the attention of the press. We all rejected stories on a Midlands earthquake and Obama’s health as not relevant for local media. Whether we ran with the international bestselling crime writer and a Society of Authors award or the bedroom habits of delegates and an outbreak of food-poisoning depended on whether the group was aiming for a red top or a broadsheet.

We practised writing press releases and soundbites; we learned the difference between plugging our work and saying ‘buy my book’. We heard that journalists see the world in headlines and that an offer to write the story will often lead to a joyous acceptance. We were told to keep an eye for quieter times, but to always be willing to contrive opportunities.

In the final part, we talked about the dreaded social media, laying the groundwork for Monday’s upcoming debate on Twitter versus Facebook. There was also a discussion about orang-utans in taxi cabs — but Simon probably wouldn’t want me to mention that — so I won’t.

Linda Lewis got rave feedback on her one-off session last year; so this year, she’s presenting a specialist course on how to write successful short stories. If the responses to the ‘improve the storyline’ exercise are anything to go by, there are some very dark individuals at this year’s conference. The trigger of ‘my friend joined an online dating agency’ led to several stories of murder and revenge; my own group’s contribution was so graphic, we didn’t even read it out loud. Definitely not a candidate for People’s Friend, that one!

I’ll skip over my experience in Peter Lyon’s effective dialogue workshop; there were some great scenes written and read out, but mine was definitely not one of them. I knew there was a reason why I write prose, not scripts. Must try harder! However, I had more success in Liz Goes’ Write About session, combining the trigger sentence she provided and a separate competition trigger to produce the beginnings of a short story. Writers can multi-task too!

“Are you eating properly?” asked a friend when I phoned her tonight. Er — not sure ‘properly is the right word: a nice healthy breakfast of muesli and yoghurt, followed by roast beef with all the trimmings at lunchtime and a fish supper tonight; but I’m certainly not going hungry — and the second helping of Eton Mess was so tiny, it hardly counts as food at all.

For the first time in my five visits to Swanwick, I've played truant tonight from the main hall and have found a tiny TV to watch the Olympics Closing Ceremony — some things are greater even than Swanwick — if only briefly.