Tag archives for UOTC
A215 – Life Writing – Initiative at Night
Here's the second of the pieces I wrote for the A215 Creative Writing online tutorial on life writing. Saturday 13th December 1991 It’s 3am on a Saturday before Christmas 1991, I’ve only been awake for 21 hours. After a day of lectures I went with the UOTC to Redford Barracks in Edinburgh for a training camp. Since 1830 I have been on the Pentland Hills doing orienteering and solving problems with a team of third year cadets. We’ve not been good at following the approved DS solutions. To change the tire on a land rover without a jack we ignored the planks and mik crates and instead rolled the vehicle onto its side before righting it after we’d changed the tire. Our time was the fastest, but the officer wasn’t pleased. To take a casualty across a minefield (laid with…
Writing and Tension/Conflict
I've been working my way through the Big Red Book (BRB) that supports the Open University's A215 Creative Writing course. I've just got to the Chapter on structure and it has made me think about how to get tension and conflict into my stories. In particular I was thinking about how to write the sort of scenes that make you want to keep on reading and keep people up at night to see what happens next. I also found this writing resource post on tension vs conflict in writing. The thought process that these triggered reminded me of an incident from my late teens. Back in July 1991 I spent a couple of weeks on the Isle of Lewis with my UOTC on annual camp. One night we were sent out on an orienteering exercise in the dark (it wasn't…