So, you’re writing a picture book – not illustrating (you’re not an artist) and you know that publishers prefer to select for illustrations whoever they think would suit the work best. If you’re lucky it will be a fairly well …
Events
Writing from the Body
When famous writers decide to get grumpy with their fans, one of their popular complaints is being asked supposedly ridiculous questions, such as whether they write with a pen or a pencil, or nowadays – a keyboard. The last time …
A Guest Post from SJ Finn. Your unfinished work: to keep or not to keep?
When we put a manuscript away, in that mythical drawer, we don’t always expect to get it out again. Indeed, it can be a big decision when to let an unfinished draft rest, when to work on it, or even …
WHAT IS WRITING? (MEDITATION AND SPECULATION.)
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 …
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 …