Writing Workshop 30 mins Exercise

What you will read below was done in 30 mins in our IRL workshop.

The 3 of us who ran the meetup pre-built a list of genres. We got to 12, with my younger colleagues patiently explaining to me the difference between ‘fantasy’ and ‘high fantasy’. (Something something maps and massive commitment to consistent world-building).

For the first 15 mins, all participants (including us! We’re not exempt from our own torture devices!) had to write up - from memory - a scene from our existing WIP.

Ding!

As the bell rang, we each pulled out, unseen, a random genre and had to spend the next 15 switching out of our comfort zone and into a new genre.

I went from lit fic to sci-fi. Nice one. I felt sorry for the person who had to go from fantasy-horror to romance. The one who had to swerve from spec fic to historical also had a tough challenge. When we read our efforts out loud to each other, there was flinching and laughter.

Here’s mine …

Harry winced when he stepped out of the lift and saw Mike, up the corridor, waiting outside his office. Harry pulled the trolley suitcase along behind him as gently as he could. Why did it have to make so much noise and be so bloody intrusive? Mike was a timid sort, but even he would probably ask what that was about, and Harry had hoped to keep all this very discreet. Work and private life - best separated, and why the hell hadn’t he decided to take the extra time it would need to go home first after work and pick up the damn case before heading off to Deal?

No point over-thinking, let’s just see what poor Mike needs - or what trouble he’s got himself into. Let’s hope it’s not that mad student again, bloody Izzie. It was utterly mean of Ian to assign her to Mike.

“Morning!” Harry yelled from down the corridor, trundling the case behind him as quietly as he could. He saw Mike looking curiously and was grateful when Mike didn’t ask anything, but just said,

“Oh, I’m so sorry if you’re going somewhere, or you’re busy - I promise I just need a minute on this one. I mean, honestly, it’s just a quick one. Nothing major”.

Harry grinned and opened his door, waving Mike in. At least a moment with Earnest Mike would take his mind off his own troubles.

Harry sat, and Mike, to Harry’s relief, stayed on his feet. Mike didn’t look too bad today - sometimes these mentor sessions could be pretty gruelling, but this was obviously a quickie. Good. Harry could do with feeling helpful and competent today; it would cheer him up a bit. He said,

“Come on then. No need for formalities here, what’s the trouble?”

“Oh, not trouble, exactly. Just a thought, really, and I wanted your opinion”.

“Go on. I’m intrigued”.

“Lauryn, in student support…”

“Ye-es? The tall woman with the wobbly bun? The Students’ Friend? Registrar’s Nemesis, the woman who gets exam and essay grades shifted even after exam board has happened?”

“Yeah, her”.

[Ding!! SHIFT TO SCI FI ]

Mike was grinning. Oops. He obviously thought that Lauryn was the bees’ knees. Better tone the sark down a bit.

“So, what about Lauryn, then, Mike?”

“Well, I met up with her at the pub last Friday -”

Christ on a bike! The two of them might figure things out between them. Carefully, carefully here …

“Mmm, just social, or about anything in particular?”

“Well, we wanted to talk about that weird diagram that was left in the photocopier room last week.”

Harry swallowed, and under the desk, his fingers curled. Mike went on.

“Laryn thinks she’s seen something like this before. Her dad, he was some sort of aeronautical engineer or something. She’s pretty sure it was the wiring diagram for an aircraft engine”.

“Er, I might be being a tad slow here, Mike, but why would that be in our photocopier? And why would it even matter?”

“Lauryn said it was a very high-spec control panel in the diagram. I mean, something way more sophisticated than anything you’d normally see”.

“Right. And so…?” Harry uncurled his fingers and thought fast.

“Well, you know the budget deficit that the VC announced?”

Harry grinned.

“Oh, we all know about the Black Hole”, and winced even as he said the words. Freudian slip, these humans called that. Must watch out for that.

Mike leaned forward and lowered his voice.

“Lauryn and I wondered if - I mean, this sounds absolutely ridiculous, I know.”

“Try me”, said Harry, keeping his bright and very human grin slapped in place on his stupid human face.

“We wondered if the VC has bought, I mean, is buying, a private plane?”

Harry laughed. His whole body relaxed and he genuinely, actually, laughed. Laughing was one of the things that actually made being human for a while fun. Maybe he could introduce laughing on Kyrias? He said,

“Gosh, that could be it, couldn’t it? I know the VC of Bradport Uni has one and ours has been seething jealous of it. And I heard that Cowbridge has two that they keep for senior management to use”.

“Yes, but Harry, why are you laughing? No money for student support, no money for the library - and they’ve got money for this?”

“Yes, you’re right, I know. I was laughing because it's so typical of the VC, isn’t it? We’re just a little teaching factory and him - he wants a private jet like the big boys ….”

I first drafted On Campus in 2018 in a one-month writing binge, shortly after leaving my tenured academic job of 25 years. The characters have stayed pretty constant, but the rest has been under major revision.

I’ve read a lot of ‘Dark Academia’, don’t like it much, and axed the only plotline based on IRL events at a (nameless) university I was once part of. We really did have anonymous threatening letters, a police investigation, faculty all suspecting colleagues, gossip & secrecy & management cover-ups - and, of course, a grad student who’d had a major breakdown at the heart of it all. (Breakdowns among postgrads are absolutely standard; we don’t talk enough about it - or about why the system repeatedly produces them).

Sub-plots got axed, the main plotline changed, and as for POV, tone and style? I’ll talk about that next time.

For now, it’s relevant for you to know that Harry (original draft name COT or cynical old-timer) and Mike (newbie probationer working towards tenure / permanence) are key characters and have been alive in my mind since 2018. Everyone in the novel has undergone a fair bit of character development, but not a lot of shift in who they are or how they behave and speak. As a plotter-planner, of course I began with tables and exercises where I dreamed these people up, and learned about everything from their secret fear to their childhood core memories and even their Enneagram type.

I’ve just been getting to know them all better, down the several recent years when bouts of writing have given way to bouts of family crisis or extreme household demands.

Through illnesses, deaths, hospitalisations, house moves, rebuilds, and all the other things that make up an everyday life when you’re part of a tightly-knit sprawling blended family - all these guys from Gravestown have been with me.

Maybe I’ll talk about Lauryn next time. (Claims to be Lauryn as in Hill but was actually named Lauren by her dad, after Bacall - to her chagrin). She was the unanticipated villain in the original plot. Now she’s a more complex (but still fucked-up) character who I’ve kept as a person with secrets in her past and as one who has an ambiguously flirty on-off stance towards Mike.

More when I get out of the F-hole again. (That’s the space-time warp where free time goes to die when you live a connected and engaged family life, instead of being in one of those Cyril Connolly-approved lives).