It’s been over four years since I last had a dedicated writing space. Recently I’ve been wondering about the effect of this absence on both my creativity and productivity. I have a good track record with desks: I love them …
The Writer Laid Bare
How to tame a book (and its author).
The writer Annie Dillard likens the process of writing to taming. She writes in her now-seminal book, ’On Writing’:
A work in progress quickly becomes feral… it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and
A Guest Post from Natasha Lester: How I Quit my Job to Become a Writer
I was too scared to become a writer twenty years ago when I went to uni. I thought being a writer wasn’t really a job. There were no writing degrees then like there are now. The closest thing was journalism …
Excursions into the (writing) wilderness
Two years into struggling to write some coherent chapters for my memoir The Dangerous Bride, and feeling overwhelmed by all the thinking and research, I took several months break to reconsider whether I could actually do this. Then, with …
A Guest Post from Peter Bishop, the former creative director of Varuna: On finding structure
Coming to the end of a writing project, I always feel –surprisingly– fretful and anxious rather than celebratory. When I actually feel I’ve finished I can feel quite panicky, and quite often I’ll start something else –sometimes within the hour.…
Writers’ Social Etiquette
Even a writer is not an island. Most of us mix with other writers, either out of want or necessity. However, unsupervised encounters between writers may result in unintended injuries – external and internal. So here are some suggested rules