Writers' Day

On Saturday I attended a Writers' Day in London, put on by the Association of Christian Writers.  After the formal part, minutes, elections etc., we had a speaker Tony Whittaker (with Power Point presentation) on using dital technology to aid our writing, getting it 'out there', making ourselves known.  He gave us a brief history of technology and moved on to using blogs, facebook, twitter, websites etc.  I found this very informative and we were all given a hand out sheet with follow-up sites to look at, books to read and more information.  We looked at books-v-ditigal/e-books and were given the amazing fact that 50% of US Amazon book sales are now on Kindle e-books.  There was a discussion about the advantages, disadvantages and many of us (me included) would hate to see the demise of real book.  Part of the pleasure of book reading is the browsing, the eye catching covers or blurb and the sensual feeling of handling a book.  As one person said, she couldn't image taking a Kindle to bed!

At lunch time we split into groups of our writing preference so I moved into the poetry group which started as the smallest group but expanded a little later.  I met some interesting people and we 'networked'!  We got to know one another, exchanged website datails and generally exchanged ideas, sites and publications we wrote for.

After lunch we welcomed John Houghton an author and Minster who talked on Christians writing about The Dark Side and how to engage this world and convey the truth with integrity.  We looked at the difference between J.K. Rowling and Philip Pulman, the distinction between fantasy and the occult and domestic paganism verses dark paganism.  A fallen world needs stories of redemption, good triumphing over bad, the lost being found.  We tackled difficult issues of Christians using bad language, violence and other 'worldly images' in our writing, something I struggle with.  Then there is the difficulty of publishers because often when this type of story is written from a Christian viewpoint you fall into neither Christian nor secular publishers reading lists.

We then had a brief workshop, dividing into groups or 4 or 6, to come up with a character who has 'fallen' and a storyline to redemption.  Ah! not so easy.  For me, who can't think on the spot, I struggled (writing mainly poetry my mind isn't geared to character building in the same way).  Our group did eventually come up with something and there were some very good ideas from other groups. 

Originally the author  G.P. Taylor was due to speak at this writers' day (his book is on my 'recent reads' list) and I was disappointed that he would not be there but John Houghton covered the issue extremely well.  The day left me with much to think about and ideas to follow up.