writing workshop

A little publicized event took place in Singapore last week when a small group of aspiring writers got together to organise a writing workshop led by Jane Camens.

As a workshop, there was little in the way of theory or analysis; the majority of the two days was spent on short 15-20 minute exercises that tested our limits: we each had to knuckle down to writing, and what emerged was startling. I discarded the empty promises of potential perfectionism and instead surrendered to the trial and error of writing. That was this workshop’s strength – we shed our “writer” personae to engage in the art and craft of writing. The results of this workshop will show themselves on this site throughout the coming weeks, for better or for ill.

A note: I was puzzled by Jane’s request, made at the beginning of the workshop, that we each respect the privacy of the group by not disclosing the internal mechanisms of each writer’s mind; after all, writers are neurotic creatures, surely ample fodder for the aspiring hack. Think of Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted.

It was only later, in the course of the days proceedings, that I realised the importance of this. Writers are a fundamentally funny lot; sometimes, we have the imagination of a child, with the penetrating eye of a trained observer. What transpires between these two points, and the result of such thinking, is what makes writing so magical.