By Marley Muirhead

9.5 Workshop Wonders (Part 2)

I’m sure you die-hard SCAB fans will remember my last SCAB. You can send your fan-mail to the school, I’m there 40 hours a week. But in the small (huge) chance you don’t, I wrote about how Caz’s creative writing workshop made me realise how much I missed them. So I have decided to do something about it! I joined a writers’ group.  The workshops have stopped because of the Christmas holidays and start again in January. I’m planning to work on a project I’ve actually had on the back burner for a little while now over the Christmas holidays so I have something to bring to the table. It’s an idea I had for a novel in my final year of university. It’s amazing how you can pack such big moments into like tiny little sentences because for me that was a very big deal. I mean, haven’t you ever wondered how people find ideas big enough for a novel? I’ve always been in awe of how someone can write 700 pages on one idea. It’s one of my life goals to be able to do that. A comment we strive to hear at SCA is “there’s a campaign in that”, meaning your idea is big enough to expand, evolve, have layers. Not every idea has a campaign in it. It’s pretty much the same principal with novels; not every idea is big enough for a whole book. Before I knew I was meant to come to SCA I was actually planning to spend the six months post-graduation starting that novel. So now I’m at SCA, I’ve been wondering whether I should make room for fiction or not while studying creative copywriting. I got a lot of contradictory yet really insightful advice about it from mentors. Mainly I was worried about whether I’d have the time for it or whether it would confuse my copywriting at the school. But then, this is going to sound so cheesy, Caz’s masterclass made me realise how happy writing fiction made me. It just clicked. Don’t get me wrong it’s just as emotionally taxing as copywriting, but I realised there’s no way that exploring another passion can make me a worse SCA student. Plus, I think as long as I realise that right now SCA takes precedence over my personal writing, then I can’t stray too far down the wrong path. The other thing I was really worried about was time. I am super nervous about adding another thing to my plate. Especially because I don’t think I’ve got to grips with time management with the course. Is it even responsible to be signing myself up for another commitment when I don’t feel I have a handle on my first one? I suppose I’ll have the answer for that in a couple of month’s time.