The Writer All Nighter!
Somehow it is already very close to the end of November and I haven’t written any blog posts this month! Sorry guys!
November has been such a busy month. I think November is one of the best months at uni (but maybe I’m just biased because my birthday is in November). You’ve already settled back into uni and your new accommodation if you’ve moved; you’re a few weeks into your modules by now so things start getting more interesting as you get into the swing of things, and the weather gets to that lovely point of year where all the trees turn golden and there’s leaves everywhere and it starts to get a bit chilly but not too cold yet either. Having said that, I probably am just biased because I’ve always really liked November.
However, by the end of November things can start to get a bit crazy as your workload piles up, hence my absence, but now I’m here I want to talk about an event that happened back at the beginning of the month: The Writer All Nighter. This is an event the Writing Society hold twice a year where we all camp out in Millburn House from about 8pm to however long we can stomach it for – this year went on until 6am! The idea is that there are two teams and each half an hour, one member from each team writes responding to a prompt in order to create a collaborative story across the night! The prompts can be really random, such as "a celebrity suddenly arrives in your story! What happens?" or "Write in verse for the next half an hour!" so it’s really interesting to see how the stories vary between the two teams and how crazy it gets due to lack of sleep! Whilst not writing, everyone else can sleep, play games, watch films etc, and it’s completely up to everyone how long they stay for. (I ducked out at about 11pm).
It was a really great night so I wanted to talk about it to give an example of one of the social events on campus which exist other than simply going clubbing! However, I also wanted to mention it in relation to the room we held it in: The Writer’s Room.
The Writer’s Room is in Millburn House and is available for Creative Writing students to book when it is not being used for teaching. It’s a flexible space so you can hold all kinds of events in it and make of it what you want. It’s so gratifying to have a space specifically for Creative Writing students and, as I’ve mentioned previously, it was one of the reasons why I chose to come to Warwick to study English and Creative Writing. I appreciate that not everyone will be able to come to an Open Day when considering Warwick, or even if you do you might not have the chance to go into Millburn House, so I hope this helps a bit.
Anyway, here are some photos of the night so you can get a feel of both the event and the room itself! Credit to one of our members, Ivan, for taking these.
(P.S. We are very messy writers. There are obviously not normally cards and things strewn everywhere when it is used for classes!)
