Fi Phillips

Yesterday I did no writing. I didn't even think about my writing. I got up at 4.30 am, got my family ready and together we drove to a local hospital. We spent the morning talking to nurses and each other. In the early afternoon, I accompanied my son to a separate room and watched him fall asleep in readiness for his operation. I'm not asking for sympathy here. I'm not telling a sad tale. The operation appears to have been a success. My son is home and recovering. My family is complete once more. As writers, our lives can centre around our literary darlings, our plots, our publishing plans and every other factor of our trade. I applaud all of that enthusiasm and commitment but on occasion, life will stop us. It will say 'hush your imaginings' and require something else of us. Never feel guilty about those times. They deserve as much commitment from us as the hours we spend weaving our imagined worlds. Books tells tales of life, which is why we read them. Writ...

Years ago (decades actually), I attended a writing class run by a local poet, Pat Borthwick. I was the youngest attendant by far. Pat's classes centred around using our life experience and memories as a subject and basis for our writing. Homework would often require us to tap into our life - one Sunday morning, a poem using symbols to describe a loved one, a holiday memory. The others in the class, including Pat herself, had a wealth of experiences to call on and I quickly came to realise how describing what some might consider to be a mundane act could often lead to a fascinating read. By comparison, my own life experience seemed, if not boring, then limited and pale. I felt I had few memories to offer up that would make for an entertaining tale. Move on around ten years and I started to write murder mystery plays for the am dram group I was part of. Based around a known cast and a familiar stage, what started as a way to fund a hobby quickly turned into a business I loved (an...

Write what you know. That phrase comes up time and time again in creative writing tutorials. For many years I dismissed this piece of advice, not through disrespect but because the story ideas I had required me to write about things I didn't know. I didn't know about living in a Tolkien-esque world. I didn't know about fighting in a battle. I certainly didn't know about grieving the death of a loved one. In my early twenties, I attended a writing class run by a very talented poet called Pat Borthwick . Pat placed great value on life experience and encouraged us to use our memories and every day lives to enrich our writing. Most of my class members were older than me and it seemed at the time that they had so much more 'life' to write from compared to my own twenty or so years. There was a wonderful American lady in her sixties or seventies who had lived in Burma for many years. If I remember rightly, her husband was a diplomat connected with the American Emb...