I won't jinx my novel by describing it too much, but there might be psychic pigs

I came to study in Wellington with no intention of taking any creative writing courses there - though various relatives assumed I'd chosen Victoria University specifically for its Institute of Modern Letters - because writing was the thing I did spontaneously, and the thing I was most motivated to improve at. Then Elizabeth Knox did a course called Worldbuilding and I said oh, alright then, my degree has room for one of my favourite New Zealand writers on Worldbuilding, and that was a great experience - though not particularly useful, I don't think, or at any rate of unconscious use. Elizabeth said a bunch of insightful things during the course, but the central thing it taught me seems to have been how to write a novel in collaboration with eleven other people, and also that one probably shouldn't. (We were the guinea pig year; I think in every year since she's run it with two groups of six to eliminate some of the problems of overstuffedness we ran into). Then I finished study and there was pandemic and the tap on my intrinsic tendency to write closed almost all the way. Early last year I said 'Clearly I need an over-arching structure, and if I haven't got a full-time job by October I will apply for the Masters program at the Institute of Modern Letters.' I did not get a full-time job - or a narration mentorship - and I did get into the course.

I arrived in week one feeling no enthusiasm despite assuming I was going to have a lot of fun soon, much the same attitude I bring to multi-day hikes. 'You have no novel to write,' muttered my depression, 'you will have used this year frivolously and there will not even be a novel.' I told my depression that I didn't even need to work against it particularly hard, because soon I would be doing an intensive course in one of my favourite things and it would blow away. This seems to have been the case! As with the hikes, I was correct about the lots of fun. I have in fact begun writing the novel on which I shall be assessed, not that it's shaped much like one - 'just write a novel that begins, moves forward along one or two plot threads for a while, then ends' would have been a very useful goal to set myself but no, I had to make it all wibbly. I like (nearly all of) my nine classmates and also like (much of) their writing and I am very curious how that changes over the course of the year. I'm the most fantasy-ass fantasy writer in the group, but not the only one, we also have someone doing ghosts, as well as someone doing a realist novel with a strong underpinning of myths about food and sex and someone doing Victorian serial killers, both of whom seem of our party. Most of us have our convenor, Kate Duignan, as supervisors - but on account of the fantasy-assness I have Elizabeth Knox again, which is exciting.

The format is two long class sessions a week. For one of the two we attend seminars. Initially these are from visiting writers, but by next month we'll be doing the seminars ourselves for each other. The other sessions are workshops: we initially do writing exercises and give and receive feedback on them, but after seven exercises we'll switch to talking about each other's folio projects, which in most cases are novels. I expected that to be chapter-by-chapter, but no, it's pretty much two big chunks, midway through the year and then late in it, which I think I'll like as a format.

Parallel to all this we keep reading diaries, which I'll probably keep posting bits of here. Ostensibly we're reading things associated with our projects, but in my case there has been mission creep, and my to-read shelf contains some things associated with my project plus everything else I caught sight of that was interesting. I have a very small backpack currently, so I have twice got out far too many books from the library and then had to wedge more than half of them into my cubby-hole in the IML postgrad library, leaving just space at the top for my classmates to leave copies of their exercises and our convenor to leave reading packets, which is the cubby's actual purpose.

I've never done a writing workshop, as such. Elizabeth's course had a few exercises, and one long workshoppy-session, but what it mainly consisted of was shared plot discussion. (Tangent: it was quite interesting, what we did was write a viewpoint character each, and then do three rounds of chapters, so the book was thirty-six chapters in three parts. Despite minimal back-and-forth during the rounds of writing, it was always possible to put the twelve draft chapters in an order that made sense, and we got a lot of narrative energy out of some of the unexpected consequences of that, although then spilled quite a lot of it down the side of the boat. I think. I have never re-read it, should do that sometime).

It's interesting to notice what I notice in a story, given a fairly short time to think about it and nine other people to point out what they notice in it too. With me it seems to be images - I might comment on a character or on a joke or voice, but repeat a motif of objects partially obscured by other objects, or steal one thing from a church literally and then one metaphorically, and it seems you have my attention.