Wednesday night came round again, with its now familiar routine of logging on to Zoom with my fellow AWC members. This week our Club Night… Read More »Want playtime to be dramatic? Check out your seven deadly sins…. Revealing Characters through Dialogue, led by Helena Sheridan – 10 March 2021
On Wednesday evening, Ayr Writers’ Club were treated to a workshop run by our very own Janice Johnston. Janice joined the Club in the mid-’90s, serving as both Treasurer and President on more than one occasion. She is currently SAW Competition Secretary and has had many writing successes, writing for BBC radio in the forms… Read More »Ayr Writers’ Club Embrace Their Inner Child – 24 February 2021
Carolyn O’Hara’s infectious enthusiasm and passion for historical non-fiction writing brought our screens to life, guiding a busy Zoom session of nineteen participants through her Bringing the Past to Life workshop. A talented poet and non-fiction writer, with articles published in a variety of magazines (Scottish Memories, Highlander and Best of British) Carolyn has also… Read More »Truth is Stranger Than Fiction* – Bringing the Past to Life – Non-Fiction Workshop with Carolyn O’Hara – 17 February 2021
Flash Fiction is all about compression. Take a short story you like, halve it, again, then again. Make every word earn its keep, cut out whole paragraphs and ‘filler’ words like articles and qualifiers, expand and contract according to the word count of the competition … cutting down is easy if you’re ruthless. Karen’s own… Read More »Karen Jones on Flash Competitions – 3 February 2021
A.W.C. was treated to a highly enjoyable and informative evening as our own Ken McGaffin and journalist John Crowley shared their expertise. Co-authors of their, soon to be published A Digital PR Recipe Book (tip number one there, by the way – start promoting your work before it’s finished) they gave us a wealth of… Read More »Grab yourself a journalist: self-publishing and self-promotion with Ken McGaffin and John Crowley – 27 January 2021
To do justice to the wealth of advice and ideas Linda Strachan shared with the assembled Zoom Squares on Wednesday evening it would simply require a transcript. Alternately, you could buy her 2019 title Guide to Writing for Children and YA (Go on, I’m sure you got some book tokens for Christmas). The pearls and… Read More »Subverting the obvious from Tuscany to the bathroom: Writing for children with Linda Strachan – 20 January 2021
Ken McGaffin, committee member and moderator for the evening, gave a warm and enthusiastic introduction for Henry Bell: the editor-in-chief of the award-winning Gutter magazine, widely published poet and most recently a successful biographer. The evening was organised in two parts, the first an exploration of Bell’s biography – John Maclean, Hero of Red Clydeside.… Read More »An evening with Henry Bell: biographer, poet, editor – 13 January 2021
Gathered round our screens, we waited for the Sanquhar Santa (aka Jeanette our President) to read us a story, to give us some cheer, to reassure us about whichever Covid Christmas ghost might haunt our festive prospects. Instead, we were encouraged to time-shift – between a balmy May evening and driech gloomy one of mid-December.… Read More »‘Twas the night before Christmas: a Party and Awards Evening – 9 December 2020
There was a good turn-out for this extremely lively, entertaining and (exercise-wise) challenging talk by Jenny Lindsay. As one of Scotland’s best known spoken words performers and winner this year of a prestigious John Byrne award for critical thinking (the only award she has ever won, she told us modestly), she had plenty to impart.… Read More »Poetically Performing Spoken Theatre, with Jenny Lindsay – 2 December 2020
Carolyn O’Hara kicked off the evening with a rousing and heartfelt introduction to her friend and fellow AWC member, Greta Yorke. She touched on Greta’s long association with AWC, her career as a primary school teacher, her love of language and her success as a writer of both fiction and poetry; including the many awards… Read More »Humorous Poetry: Rhyme Time with Greta Yorke – 25 November 2020
The second club night of the 2020-2021 season proved that Ayr Writers’ Club members’ pens and fertile imagination are always at the ready. Jeanette launched us off with a selection of ‘what if?’ writing prompts. The first one was What if you could go forward to the end of 2021. What has changed? Interestingly,… Read More »Ghosts, Invisibility and the Spectre of a Certain Mr. D Trump – 11 November 2020
On Wednesday twenty of us gathered by Zoom to hear Donald Reid’s talk. I didn’t know what he was going to tell us except that it was related to writing non-fiction. However I ended up with seven pages of notes, because he provided so much information on topics he is passionate about. Donald retired after… Read More »Mining the facts: articles and non-fiction with Donald Reid – 4 November 2020