The Little Black Book

My face to face writing group decided earlier this year to explore their creativity and one of the projects that's really captured my imagination is The Little Black Book.

No-one talks about "The Book". It is handed to the next person on the list at the start of each meeting. Longing looks are directed at it by its new custodian before it disappears into her bag, to be devoured the minute she walks in the door from face to face.

So what's inside? A round robin long short story, or short novella. Each writer must add another four pages to the story (plus any artwork they like), before passing it onto the next writer two weeks later. There are brief character bios in the back, but other than that it can go in any direction you want to take it.

The last time I had the book I turned a minor character into a major player, introduced a crooked cop to the story and gave one of the heroines an unusual cosmetic procedure. I can't wait to see how that story turned out. I'm anxiously awaiting my second round. I'm totally in the dark about this story but I did catch a glimpse of a pink feather as the book was handed across the table. Flamencos? Fairies? Melbourne Cup hats?

Oooohhh the suspense!

Boosting our Creativity

I love challenging my creativity and pushing the barriers of my storytelling - a legacy of a crusty old writer who tutored me in a year long short story writing course. He didn't enjoy romance, and tried his hardest to have me write different genres. And that involved throwing challenges my way. I wrote stories based on single words, occupations, feelings - anything he came up with. Each story pushed me to my limits, but looking back it was worth it.

A few of the Bootcampers who crit for each other are enjoying a creativity exercise - we're making and swapping story starter envelopes. You're given a list of items and you need to find pictures of them. These are sealed into an envelope (the style of envelope is part of the creative challenge) and then its lucky dip time - you choose someone else's envelope and off you go. We started the challenge on Friday night. By Saturday, most of us had sealed our envelopes. I was so enthused, I made up a second one to swap with my online crit partner. We swap envelopes next week, and the goal is to write a 3000 word short story within a month, then submit it for publication.

I can hardly wait to see what my lucky dip envelope holds.