Fingers. Their performance on the keyboard, pianist-like; this private recital. Their pulsing sensations and rhythms are supposedly at our mind’s service, but really – feeding it, stamping their music onto our vocabulary and imagination. They labour hard. Sometimes they …
Events
A Guest Post from Kev McCready: How to Get into ‘The Zone’ of Writing
As a writer, one has certain responsibilities. Being a guardian of truth and beauty in a howling, godless void is a mere detail. We also have to pay the rent, do grocery shopping, clean the toilet, and have meaningful/meaningless relationships. …
Once upon the time…
The imminent beginning of yet another year makes me think about other beginnings – those first pages, paragraphs, sentences, words that pull readers into our tales. How do we make them sing?
Most obviously, banality is the enemy of good …
A Guest Post from Victoria Thompson: Writing about Love & Sex
When I wrote my second novel The Secret Seduction and the Enigma of Attraction, I did not set out to write an erotic novel, but a love story between two complicated, intelligent, wounded people who are afraid to love …
Literary Husbands: Dictionary Definition
- Not as well-known as their female counterparts, the Literary Wives (LW). Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein’s ‘wife’, for example, is nowadays inseparable from Stein’s oeuvre; Stein even titled one of her books ‘The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas’, forever mythologizing
A Guest Post from Bambi Smyth about Mixing Creative Nonfiction Genres
I’ve never been very good at keeping things simple. When I write, I have more ideas swirling around my head than kites at a traditional Japanese festival, and invariably they get tangled up.
Similarly, when I came up with the …
A Writer’s Guide to Surviving the Second Child
Dear Readers, I just want to let you know that I wrote this blog post, and intended to send it, before my second son was born. But the baby outsmarted me and turned out before that… Hence both the delay …
A Guest Post from Leah Kaminsky: How to Write a Novel in Ten Years
It took me ten years to write The Waiting Room, my debut novel. Well, actually, that’s pure fiction – I made the number up. It was really more like thirty years. Writing my novel felt at times akin to …
Going on a Reading Diet
One of the best pieces of advice a writer can get is – read, read, READ. Read as widely and as voraciously as you can. Make reading a priority even over writing, at least for some years. Be adventurous in …
A Guest Post by Laurie Steed: The Family Guide to Writing & Parenting
Once, I was a full-time writer.
My day began at six, with coffee and a slice or two of fruit toast. I’d ruminate on character arcs and plot developments as though they were the very stuff of life. If time …