A Saturday with Arvon

A life writing course teaches me life lessons

Hello, happy Wednesday,

This newsletter is late because for once I took my own advice and rested when I needed to. I think we can call that progress.

One of the reasons I needed a rest was because I spent all of Saturday writing! I did a one day Arvon foundation course on life writing, hosted by Cathy Rentzenbrink and Kit de Waal, which was absolutely brill.

What was really nice about the course was that it was for people who already write, and was pitched as a sort of creative boot camp. We spent the morning looking at ways to ‘unstick’ yourself when you get stuck, which is, let me tell you, all the time. The mind mapping exercises weren’t particularly helpful for me, a person who cannot use a pen, but I really liked free writing.

Cathy’s book has also been providing reassuring company

This is the practice of typing continuously, whether you know what to say or not, and if you don’t know what to say you simply write “I don’t know what to say” until something comes to you. Cathy recommended starting with the prompt “I am stuck in my writing because” and much to my surprise by the end of the allotted five minutes I’d had a minor epiphany about my own hang ups. I’ll be using this exercise again.