I teach creative writing in Cheddar, where I live. At the moment the group meets on Thursday mornings. 

We produced one anthology of our work a few years ago, and have just brought out another. It has a variety of stories, articles and poems there’s a lot of humour, quite a bit of spookiness, some sadness and an element of scariness!

It’s an absolute snip at £6.99, and you can obtain it so easily from Amazon – just click here. Everything we make from it will go to local charities for young people.

We often begin the class by reading out the work people have done following the previous session: it’s always fascinating to see how the stories/poems/whatever vary, even though they came from the same starting point.

Then we’ll do a short exercise or two. It might be a paragraph about a room that’s been important to you for some reason, or it might be a short poem, a haiku perhaps – or a recent discovery, a cinquain, which is a short poem of five lines with a set number of syllables.

Next we’ll go on to a longer piece. I might ask people to choose a postcard of a painting, and take them through how they might make a story from that. Or I might take in a collection of objects (or ask them to bring something in) and ask them to first describe their chosen piece, and then use this as the starting point for a story. They’ll start that in class, and then finish it or do more work on it at home – and then share it the following week.(No-one has to read their work out if they’re not comfortable with that, but usually they are.)