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
Events
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
Guest Post: Charles Bane on finding poetic inspiration in spirituality
The unconscious preserves our cultural memory and before Jung and Freud, this was acknowledged by rabbis who insisted that every Jew, past, now and future are witnesses to Sinai.
We search to understand our cosmos, and are dismayed that it …
5 Things I Learned This Year about Publishing a Book
As some of you may know, 2014 has been a big year for me. I finally had my first book in English, and in Australia, published. Most of the year had been dominated by preparing for this moment – editing …
A Guest Post by the Novelist Annabel Smith: Why I decided to self-publish
When I began my PhD in Writing fifteen years ago, my goal was simply to see if I could write a novel. As my PhD progressed and I became confident that I would achieve my initial goal, I immediately began …
The Vices and Virtues of Dialogue Writing
In some writers’ residencies, the duties of the resident writer may include appearing at local writers’ groups. In one such a group I attended, a writer read weekly from her novel-in-progress. On my first visit, she explained that the chapter …
A Guest Post by Karen Turner: The secrets of writing historical romance
The historical romance novel is today one of the most popular genres in women’s fiction. As an avid reader, I, as many of you no doubt do, enjoy reading a variety of genres. This week I’m reading an autobiography, next …