Today at 6.44 am it was the Spring Equinox in the Southern hemisphere. Today night and day are about as even as they can get. And from now each day will continue to get a little longer until the Summer Solstice. I had forgotten that our seasons are made by ‘the tilt of the earth’s axis’, that they all depend on how close we are to The Sun in our journey around her.

I’ve facilitated creative writing in the community and at uni for many years now and I even got a guernsey from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council in 2011 just for doing what I love, so I feel pretty lucky. To honour the support I received from them I planned to try and facilitate creative writing in another way, that is through my blog. And today’s the day, a day of evenness and equalities but also of angles. The perfect day to begin this project.

I’m relatively new to the blogosphere so this is a bit of an experiment. Let’s just see how it develops.

So, I am inviting you to write. What I propose is that every Equinox and Solstice I’ll suggest a prompt or an exercise or a game for you to write with. Think of my suggestions as you will, I develop them intuitively but purposefully. If they lead elsewhere that is fine. The point is to get words on the page. To me that is gold. You’ve started something. So …

EQUAL. Hold this word in your mind for a moment and then play with it in words. Extemporise. Improvise. Don’t stop writing. If nothing comes just write about that eg I don’t know what to write even even even not even unfair etc until more words come. Write for five minutes.

Then do the same thing with ANGLES.

Write for five minutes. Read it over. You might not like all of what what you’ve written, but there will be something, some small thing of interest, something a little special you could develop and work with.

Just write without thinking too much and let one thing lead to another. You can use a keyboard and bash away or be ‘old school’ and use a pen or pencil and paper (I like pencil myself). Don’t worry about spelling or punctuation or even making that much sense. If you’ve written it by hand then type it up. Don’t be tempted to fix it up too much. Then post it in the comments.

I’ll update this post in a couple of days with my response to EQUAL and ANGLES. But don’t be influenced by what I write. Just put down what comes into your mind. I’ll approve the responses which you’ve posted in the comments and they will go public in about three weeks. And I’ll check in with you about it so don’t worry. And we can discuss our raw little pieces of writing and their potential. I’m hoping to get a story out of this exercise, and I’ll write it on-line in later posts so those interested can see its development. (I’m intending to experiment with Carmel Bird’s Dear Writer Revisited in relation to this as well). I’ll leave the post up so anyone can join in at anytime. I’ll sometimes comment and even make suggestions about where the pieces and fragments might go, and you can too. I’m hoping it will be lots of fun.