On a gloomy late-October afternoon a couple of years ago, seven brave East Anglia Networkers clad in Halloween costumes gathered in front of their screens for a wicked online workshop, Don’t Be Afraid of Writing.
They might have expected some kind of trickery but they were actually in for a fun treat. They were about to summon the spirits of famous horror authors for an afternoon.
Once the courageous attendees split into two teams (no limbs were harmed in the splitting), they spun the Wheel of Doom.
The mighty Wheel decided on their fate and gave each team the name of a well-known author. The teams had to look at a sample of their author’s writing, analyse it with the help of some witchery (i.e. a handout with pointers), then call upon the scribbling spirits and write a piece of their own in their author’s style.
Team A’s destiny was to channel Stephen King, team B had to capture H. P. Lovecraft’s essence.
As the event’s main organiser and an attendee, Anikó Pető-Mordovski had some scary good fun with this workshop!
When preparing for it, she had a chance to come up with some corny Halloween puns and cram them all in the event’s “Spooky Styles” handout. This is essentially a quick guide for analysing an author’s writing style, looking at different aspects, such as vocabulary, poetic devices, sentence structure and the voice of the narrator.
Besides preparing for the event, she also got to participate in the collaborative writing exercise. It was amazing to bounce ideas off each other and observe how others’ minds work in a creative scenario. She was in the team that had the challenge of trying to think as the Victorian author, Lovecraft. The other team had to tackle King’s very American way of writing and cultural references.
As Holly-Anne Whyte, one of Team King said: “I think we worked together really well and even though progress was slow because we played around with all the different ideas, we made a very creative, well-written start on our horror story.”
Alanah Reynor, her team mate enjoyed the atmosphere: “Our Halloween costumes may not have won us any prizes, but the ambiance was perfect. Stephen King’s mysterious writing was the eerie focus of a fun and scary workshop, organised to the finest detail by Anikó. Working with colleagues to craft a spooky backdrop to our story was an enriching, yet spine-chilling, experience. We never finished, but the ominous feeling was certainly there.”
For Laura Elvin of Team Lovecraft collaboration was one of the fun – and useful – aspects of the workshop: “Writing collaboratively in a small group provided a great opportunity for teamwork. The workshop was a fun and entertaining way to round off the working day in congenial company. Not only that, it was a useful exercise in analysing and identifying different styles of writing and then imitating them, a valuable skill for all translators. All in all, a very enjoyable event!”
And this year, our brave East Anglians are ready to repeat the terrific experience: we’re coming together to tackle AI and its interpretations of great authors on 30 October, during our GhoulGPT event.
