Events

The novel The Hot Guy started out as a joke. My co-author Mel Campbell and I are both film reviewers, and we often go together to preview screenings as part of our job. One day we started talking, jokingly, about …

Last month I blogged about the importance of failure for writers arguing that failure is (unfortunately…) an intrinsic, and healthy, part of the writing process. In my experience at least, feeling like I was a failure while I wrote my …

I write about dead people.

Not ghosts. At least, not so far. I write fiction set in the past. It’s not the smartest career move, to be honest, but apparently I can’t help it. Historical fiction requires years of meticulous …

Recently I came across an intriguing quote about the nature of artistic process by William Bailey, a notable visual artist. Apparently he said: ‘I believe that every painter is in a state of continual failure.’ At first I was puzzled, …

I have met quite a few writers who, like me, have written novels, plays or collections of poetry within the framework of a PhD.  The motivation for writing within the University is sometimes a scholarship, which offers financial support for …

Fiddling with fiction can be so very, very tricky, structural editing in particular. Henry James referred to editing as ‘the butchers’ trade’: we dissect, we cut, we rearrange the parts. Ten years as an editor and I still worry that …

I’ve noticed a curious anxiety among some writers who teach writing about coming across as supposedly elitist when they discuss reading with their students. While these writers themselves are often ambitious readers and may complain to their peers about how …

In a 1999 interview with the New York Times, Annie Proulx was quoted as saying:

’The internet is good for bulletin boards on esoteric subjects, reference works, lists and news – timely utilitarian information, efficiently pulled through the wires… Nobody …

We live in the time of Writing Resource Cornucopia. There are myriad aides for writers out there – books, magazines, courses and websites offering writing advice and exercises;  sometimes even recipes for creating the next bestseller.

I have my reservations …

For the past few years I’ve been writing a work of creative nonfiction that brings together memoir and research. It tells the story of a period of time in which I was blindsided by overwhelming postnatal anxiety and felt uncertain …