If you’re thinking about blogging, let me say this up front: DO IT. I’ve been writing online since 2003, but mid-way through 2006 a friend sent me a link to this website she called a ‘blog’. It was Dooce.com, where …
Events
How to seduce a reader
My favorite writers are not so much writers as seducers, shamans, tricksters. Their works affect me on a gut level. Reading their books feels like being hypnotised or making love. I cannot explain my excitement about Marguerite Duras, for example, …
The challenges of stream-of-consciousness writing: A guest post by Leon Silver
I wrote my first novel Dancing with the Hurricane from the perspective of a fifty-one year old man sitting at his comatose uncle’s hospital bed. The nursing staff had advised him to squeeze his uncle’s hand and talk to him …
The Certain Uncertainty of Writing Fiction: A Guest Post from Kirsten Krauth
I didn’t do a lot of research for my first novel, just_a_girl. Speaking from the point of view of a teenager, full of contradictions: I could do that. Speaking from the point of view of a mother, fretting about …
Writing about Others
Sometime after my memoir The Dangerous Bride came out, I received an email from a woman who had read my book. Her name was Anna, she was of a Russian origin and lived in Melbourne. There was also a Russian …
Dr Writer & Mr Editor: A guest post by Dmetri Kakmi
As a writer who is also an editor, I’m often asked how it feels to be edited. In other words, how does it feel to be on the receiving end of criticism and someone else’s red pen, instead of being …
How to be a writer
The German novelist Thomas Mann once suggested that writers are those people who find writing difficult, and I suspect the vast majority of writers would agree with him (I don’t really want to know about the few lucky ones who …
10 tips for running a writers’ group: Guest post by Tracy Sayre
It was on a balmy evening in Mozambique that I discovered my love of writing groups. I was working there as a volunteer teacher. With lots of free time and few distractions, I hoped to revise a manuscript I had …
Alcohol, insanity & other methods for unblocking writer’s block
Writer’s block, as I discussed in my previous post, is a common, and debilitating, phenomenon among writers. The good news is it is possible to fight this condition, but the trick is to find what works for each of us. …
The challenges of writing historical fiction: a guest post by Linda Weste
Recently I gave a reading from Nothing Sacred, a work of historical fiction set in late Republican Rome, in Canberra, at the once-residence of historian Manning Clark whose A History of Australia is regarded as the best-known general history of …