Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned That Writing Is Not As Lonely As I Thought

See all the lovely people in the photo above? Last week I went to Nantes and attended my very first writing workshop with all of them. And it was incredible.

Every morning we would meet up in a different part of the city and do some guided exercises to help flex our creative muscles. We went to a château to try and describe people, and collected smells from a street market; inspired by the oulipo movement, we tried to write stories without the letter E; we wrote scenes about untranslatable words, or based on nonsense words we invented ourselves. I also got a chance to test my French on various waiters and baristas, and was pleasantly surprised to learn it wasn’t as rusty as I’d feared!

The afternoons were where the real fun happened, though. Every day we spent two hours giving each other feedback on our writing, and I’m not sure I can describe the thrill of being in that space with those people. There was no ego there, no sense of one-upmanship; just a bunch of extremely talented writers who all wanted to help each other hone their craft. I’ve always thought of writing as a very lonely experience — you sit alone at a desk and pin your words to the page — but this week reminded me how vitally important it is to surround oneself with other creatives. And the others agree: despite being dotted across Europe and North America, we’re already planning more workshops online.

A huge thanks to Anna Polonyi and Emily Monaco for organising the workshop, and to my fellow wordsmiths — Christine, Joe, Kyle, Natasha, Peng, Stef and Victoria — for making the week so memorable with their kind words and magnificent prose.