"We'll do some limbering-up exercises, a bit of creative writing and maybe a touch of poetry," announces tutor Caroline Gilfillan brightly. "But don't be scared!"
It's 9am and I'm huddled inside a slightly chilly Drill Hall. Limbering up I rather fancy; creativity sounds quite pleasant, in a distant and mildly fuzzy kind of way. Poetry seems stretching it, though, at least before I've had a coffee break. It's all very well, this writing lark, but like any self-respecting arts journalist I feel rather stubbornly that latte facilities should come first.
A group of 25 of us have trooped off the festival site and down the long road into town - a surprising liberation from the rather Terminal 3-ish feel of the main Hay complex; like breaking out past passport control and into the skies beyond - in order to coax our inner writer out of hiding and onto the page.
Presiding over our slightly tremulous circle is Caroline, Open University writing tutor and as cheerfully no-nonsense as you might expect. "It's just like when you go to the gym," she announces. "You need to warm up first."
Her technique is simple: start with some free writing ("hotpenning" is the racier name in the States, apparently), move on to editing and then hone and chip away until you're slightly less unhappy with what you've got. It all seems straightforward, and so, to my surprise, it becomes; we're given a theme to get us going, words steadily emerge, and not all of them are immediately binnable. I convince myself I'm quite enjoying this.
The next exercise is harder: we're given a picture depicting people, asked to identify a person and then come up with a convincing backstory: name, age, family, hopes, fears, desires, that sort of thing. I'm given a small, slightly unfunny cartoon (the kind you might be tempted to stick on a fridge if you don't mind the social consequences), get utterly stuck on finding a name and when a rather overwrought passage of E Annie Proulx is presented as a model for how to delineate character, clam up entirely.
I've always quite enjoyed taking apart pieces of writing - it's what I do for a living - but the prospect of doing a light bit of lit crit palls when what waits around the corner is replacing it with some text of your own. I glance nervously around. Everyone else seems to be relishing the exercise, and when the turn comes to volunteer to read out a passage, everyone wants a go. Some good writing emerges. I feel ashamed for being surprised.
But we're on the home straight now, towards the poetry. Caroline presents us with a piece of paper sporting two fruity poems: Seamus Heaney's Blackberry-Picking (which goes down well with people who saw him perform a few days back) and William Carlos William's This is Just to Say (plums, icebox, arty larceny - you know the one). We skip over the Heaney - "ideally you need a bowl of fruit," says Caroline - and attempt writing a simple message poem instead. At last: my chance to write about coffee. I let the imagined scent of it fill my nostrils and get stuck in.
