The Magic of Writing

To celebrate National Writing Day, Subject Adviser for Creative Writing Marcia shares why she find writing so effective at bringing people together.

From short stories to poetry, u3a members up and down the country find inspiration from writing groups.

On National Writing Day, Marcia, u3a’s subject leader for Creative Writing, shares why she finds it so effective in bringing people together.

“In the writing groups, we are all magicians”, says Marcia. “We conjure up something out of a prompt in a few words – sometimes just one word.

“We bring to our meetings characters and places, events, situations and stories from imagination mixed with memory.

“We notice the magic when we are rapt by what someone reads out, or when the same idea has come to more than one of us. Sometimes a few of us will have used the same unusual word not heard in everyday speech. Usually, the amazement is the variety of stories the prompt has conjured up.”

Creative Writing groups are open to everyone – from those who have dabbled in storytelling all their lives, to those who are putting pen to paper for fun for the first time.

Why not enter our Short Story Competition, which is back for a fourth year? The theme for 2023 is Decisions and we are once again delighted to be partnering with Bloomsbury.

The 12 finalists will receive a copy of The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, which is edited by Alysoun Owens who returns as one of our judges.

The overall winner will see their story published in Third Age Matters magazine, which reaches over 250,000 households, with a bespoke illustration to accompany it. They will receive a framed copy of their story as it appears in the magazine. The deadline for submission is 12 noon on Monday, 26 June. Enter on the u3a learning pages.