St Deiniols in November

Since I would like to call myself a budding writer, I thought I would try and be verbose and eloquant in my account of the day at St Deiniol's Library. So here goes...

We went to St. Deiniol's and it was dead good. Sorry, I would say a bit more but I have a very poor imagination and everyone made me use up what little I had yesterday in what could only be described as a totally inspiring day. (Well, maybe not 'only described'; it could have been described as 'a frosty, foggy November morning' or 'Saturday'.)

The library at St. Deiniol's is a beautiful building in a beautiful setting. As someone (it may have been Chris) pointed out, the library looks like you expect old libraries to look. Bill said it reminded him of Terry Pratchett and he half expected an Orangutan to be swinging across the shelves. Unfortunately the bannister upstairs was loose so I couldn't go swinging (unless you count Bill's workshop where I teamed up with Joyce and Steph with Tom - but that's another story).

Polly led the first workshop and had us sniffing ladies' handbags - something I told the judge I would never do again - and eating fruit. Quite how this prompted Tom to write of witches' cats, or Bill to write about black bikinis, I'm not sure.

I went next and adopted a similar tactic to my normal teaching, i.e. don't prepare anything, say very little and let everyone else do the work. There were some brilliant pieces of work throughout the day, but Bob's political apology was superb. He clearly has a future in avoiding saying anything.

Lunch was lovely. I have to say, for £20 we were well cared for in terms of the room, the food and drinks and just having the opportunity to write undistracted for so long.

After lunch, Bob did his bit. Bob's was much more of a taught lesson than the morning's sessions and made a nice contrast. Instead of writing a finished piece, we had to think about a character's journey, develop a character and develop a plot idea. This was very stimulating and provided us all with good ideas for future works.

Bill's session changed the mood again. He had us working in pairs on dialogue and some of the work had everyone in hysterics, as did Polly's comment towards the end of the session that she'd finally worked out what was going on. It took me a while to recover from Tom rolling about on the floor begging for a sick note while Steph told him he wasn't cut out to be a fitness instructor.

Christine's workshop at the end was also very inspiring. She had us all packing a Gladstone bag with six items. Tom read a beautiful piece about Christening gifts, Steph packed herself in the bag and Chris did his first piece that wasn't about sex. The variety of the sessions and the running order, which happened (partly by coincidence) to be perfect made the whole thing work so well.

Both Steph and I are so glad that we went and feel so inspired that we may even get round to writing something one day. Thanks must go to Joyce for organising this fantastic event.