Recently I enrolled upon a course of Zoom based writing workshops. These delightful clambakes giving me an opportunity to engage with like-minded individuals who share my love of penmanship, or penwomanship in the case of other participants.
Incidentally, despite yours truly’s spell checker stating penwomanship isn’t a genuine word, as penpersonship receives similarly negative responses from online dictionaries, it’s remaining within the essay… After all, I’ve concluded, future admonishment for utilising an incorrect word beats an accusation of sexism any day.
Like all people, unless of course you’re a proud dyed in the wool misogynist, I endeavour to avoid talk which may lead to accusations of misogynism… And if you don’t believe me ask my partner Sarah after she’s finished ironing my shirts!
Despite running the risk of an unappreciative scolding from my girlfriend for the earlier playful jibe, I (rightly or wrongly) feel moved to include the mischievous quip to lighten up this, thus far, lukewarm literary fare… I’ll no doubt (rightly) be ‘put right’ about adopting such a controversial content approach during my next literary workshop.
To clarify, I’m not misogynistic; I embrace and appreciate the magnificence of females in all fields… Well, with the possible exception of women’s football, which (like EastEnders and anything featuring Richard Madeley) I still can’t bring myself to watch.
Anyhow, GJ Strachan’s driver behind workshop enlistment is to improve at my craft via feedback and tips from more experienced authors. Me seeking a literary vehicle to exhibit my art, which will hopefully one day enable me to monetise future projects; or maybe receive recompense for the thousands of blogs I’ve written over the past 5, or so, years.
Each of the Writing from Home sessions (held twice a week) provide participants with a narrative topic for that day. Although we’re afforded carte blanche to write any prose our heart desires, course attendees are offered a one word topic prompt for each session should they require a… well,.. errrr… a topic prompt.
Today’s subject suggestion, should we accept the mission before the tape self-destructs in five seconds, being ‘hesitate’.
Although thus far bereft of notions relating to this subject matter, foolishly I’ve decided to go with the tutor’s prompt. As a consequence, today’s blog will hopefully relate to, or a least include, observations relating to hesitation.
As alluded to above, with so many other subject matters at my disposal, I’m uncertain whether I’ve made the right decision to pen a minimum 500 words on the topic… In fact, you could say I’m hesitating about proceeding with a literary proposition relating to the theme ‘hesitate’.
That being said, after re-reading the above paragraph, I could argue by revealing my hesitation I am actually writing about the prompted subject matter. GJ Strachan’s disclosed uncertainty inadvertently affording him a ‘get out of jail’ card; serendipitously allowing him to broach today’s theme within the prose content.
For once, yours truly’s habitual procrastination proving helpful. My dithering actually proving to be the catalyst to producing the word flow before you now. Uncertainty which proved to be the key to rendering once chaste pages with around 500 words; a total I set as the minimum wordage for completed blogs.
I guess sometimes you achieve goals more through luck than judgement.
