‘Expect the unexpected’ – a piece of advice uttered so frequently we forget who first said it, and at the latest Writers’ Circle meeting, a useful phrase to summarise our evening.

I thought I would be telling you about an evening with a guest speaker, the poet James Nash. Alas, James had to postpone his appearance until early next year, and so we found ourselves with an eleventh hour schedule change.

We opted for a members’ evening. These are always good fun; a chance to flex our writing muscles and take advantage of more than just our own brains when thinking about the writing process.

Our chosen ‘workshop’ was on character. The basic idea was to randomly select a short character summary (I got ‘female, aged 59, naïve, planning to retire to Morecombe’) and, through a progression of layering tasks, slowly begin to build a character.

Our first task was to answer three random questions, written by another Circle member, in the voice of our character. Another was to think up a history for the character, and include some form of flaw that could in turn create a plot, or at the very least a conflict.

It was here the unexpected reared its head once more. Many writers will tell you creating characters is one of the more difficult parts of the process. An equal number will tell you character is the easy bit, it’s thinking up plots that’s hard.

I’m never entirely sure in which camp I belong, but one thing that did become clear through completing this exercise was the way in which character and plot can in many ways stem from one another; a sort of creative paradox, but one that could potentially make the process of writing much easier.

From my brief character description, I started to ask myself why a naïve 59-year-old woman might want to retire to Morecambe. My character’s answers to the questions posed by another member indicated to me my character had low self-esteem. Perhaps, through loneliness, she has decided to try online dating? Perhaps her new love interest is trying to convince her to part with her cash to buy a place in Morecambe with him? The obvious angle would be the con-man, and the obvious ending to her tale an unhappy one.

And then I remembered to expect the unexpected. How would this story work if I were to challenge the reader’s cynicism; to allow my character, who seems like she is about to be duped, to actually have a happy ending?

All of this ‘plot’ from a nine-word character profile on an evening when I expected to be listening to a poet. Whoever it was that first gave the aforementioned advice was most certainly correct.

Our next meeting will be at 7.30pm on Tuesday (October 8) at the Blind Centre, when members are invited to read some of their material for critiques by the rest of the group.

And Ilkley author, Mandy Sutter, whose novel Stretching It was recently published, will speak to Airedale Writers Circle on November 12.