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In a stunning feat of derring-do, poet Tim Clare is attempting to write 100 poems today. Tim Clare is a talented performance poet, who recently played a great set at Hammer&Tongue. He was also part of the show Found in Translation, which I saw in London last year, and the writer of We Can't All Be Astronauts, a lovely book about not being a bestselling writer.

In his blog, Tim has talked about speed poetry, where groups of poets write new work in 10 minutes. This is something I'm very interested in after my experiments with Write Club. In one recent post, Mr. Clare talked about the benefits of speed writing on his work:

"Each speed poetry session, I might hear between three and twenty new poems read out to me by their authors. Each one gave me hints on different ways of approaching the same subject matter or interpreting the same phrase – oh yes, I'd think, a poem can sound like found dialogue, or it can be like a little third-person short story with line breaks, or it can have a chorus like a song, or repeated lines, or take all its similes from a particular lexical field, or be presented as instructions, or just be a list of stuff, or be an open letter to somebody, or be in praise of something, or adopt the style of another type of text like a newspaper report. Slowly, I was building up a repetoire of options for when I got the next title… Doing speed poetry regularly helps abolish a fear of blank pages. You learn to just roll your fucking sleeves up and have a bash."

The attempt starts today at 9:00 GMT and there's a blog set up for the poems. Tim is planning about eight minutes a poem, and will be posting the titles on twitter as he starts each one so people can play along. I'm sorry that I'll be at work most of the day and unable to watch until the evening.

Last night was the second Write Club, run by Ellen de Vries and myself. Write Club is a flash fiction writing event (no, definitely not a workshop) which sprang from Brighton's Write Club networking group. The night has the following rules:

• The night is divided into rounds. Each round has a prompt image and a time limit of 15, 10, 5 or 2 minutes.
• Everyone writes a story or poem 'inspired' by the image
• Everyone then takes a turn reading what they've written, whether they're happy with it or not.
• There is no formal critique of the pieces.
• Nobody is allowed to apologise or pre-empt their work – what you've stands or fall on its own merits.

(We work very hard at not making Fight Club references, as shown by my restraint in the list above. But last night did feel a little reminiscent of the movie, with 18 of us in the basement of the Skiff after hours. Word of mouth had brought in more people than last time, some of whom I didn't know personally. For what it's worth, I see Ellen as the Tyler Durden figure).

I felt more nervous this time because of the larger group. I wanted everyone to leave feeling they'd had a worthwhile evening. And it was, of course, guaranteed that I'd have a projector glitch half-way through the night. Even so, I think people enjoyed the evening and the approach we've taken.

I don't know if it was my nerves, but I was less happy in general with the work I produced this time. I found it harder to come up with ideas, facing a blank sheet three minutes through one of the five-minute rounds. Even though Ellen and I choose the pictures, we don't manage to prepare ideas in advance and the prompts end up being as hard for us as everyone else.

Despite feeling less sure about my work, there were two pieces from last night that I'd like to do more with which, I guess, is good going (and better than last time). But the main thing was that I had a fun evening. I heard some amusing, interesting and thought-provoking stories, some of which seemed well-formed despite the short time available.

Ellen and I are still tinkering with the format. Some ideas and prompts have worked well in the last two sessions, other things not so well, but I'm very excited about the third Write Club session, which will be coming soon…

If you want to play along at home, the pictures we chose (CC-licensed photos from flickr tagged with Brighton) were:

1. Ghosts on the shore (10 minute round)
2. chickens (5 minute round)
3. Pac-Man Drinking (2 minute round)
4. Fish and chips (15 minute round)
5. movie still #6 (5 minute round)
6. The Head (2 minute round)

Thanks to everyone who came, and thank you to the Skiff for providing a fantastic venue

Sunday travel on East-Midlands trains is a trial, with the journey to St Pancras taking twice as long as during the week. The one advantage of this is that it provides some quiet time for reading. The weekend before last I received my copy of Vanessa Gebbie's new book, Short Circuit, a collection of essays on writing short stories. I read the book over the weekend and finished it on my epic crawl to London.

Short Circuit is a very good book. It was refreshingly free of mysticism, offering practical advice and techniques. Being a collection there are many different voices, some even contradicting one another as Vanessa has pointed out. Not every piece in the book spoke to me, but I don't think it should have done – I imagine every writer could find something useful in this collection. Some of the things I found most interesting are below:

• My favourite piece was by David Gaffney. Gaffney has written two collections of microfiction, Sawn-off Tales and Aromabingo. Microfictions fascinate me, and I've found homes for a few sub-100 word stories. Not all of my pieces have worked, and Gaffney offers some interesting advice on structuring tiny stories. Most useful was his suggestion to put a microfiction's ending in the middle to avoid the punch-line effect. Great advice, and something I can use in my own work.
• Alex Keegan's piece, '24: The importance of theme' was very interesting, starting with a discussion of theme, then discussing how theme can be explored through the use of character. It's a compelling argument, and gave me some ideas for fixing a few stagnant stories.
• Elaine Chew talks about the epiphany ending for short stories, "sudden or dawning change upon or realizations of inner truth for a protagonist based on the events of the story" Chew questions how realistic an approach this is, how such stories often rely on time stopping as the character is changed. With such an ending the reader does not see any resulting change in the character's actions. Using a story by Lorrie Moore as a model, Chew suggests a series of epiphanic footprints are more realistic, "the dribble-down effect of a life-changing realization."
• Paul Magrs essay was fun, a quirky list of thoughts on creative writing, written at the end of a term teaching workshops
• The most fascinating piece was Sarah Salway's discussion, 'Stealing Stories', particularly in light of the scandals this summer. Salway focusses on stories heard from family and friends, or found in newspapers. In her introduction, however, she quotes TS Eliot's line that "Mediocre writers borrow, great artists steal", comparing such theft to stealing a car: if the car is stripped down or resprayed, it will be unrecognisable to the original owners. Which seems to support the view that theft, particularly of virtual goods, doesn't count if no-one notices that a crime has been committed. It's a fascinating and provocative essay, which amusingly practises what it preaches.

Short Circuit is a fun book. It's certainly given me more techniques to work with than most writing manuals I've read. Well worth the time.