Reading has been essential to my development as a writer. I don’t just read as a reader, but always, invariably, I also read as a working writer. I’ve taught myself this way of reading through years of writing. Reading is …
The writer laid bare
The Title Project: A guest post by Graeme Simsion
Here’s your brief: write one sentence, or one phrase—one word, even—that will define your work, and you. It will be read more widely than any other sentence you’ve written, will be front and centre on your résumé, and feature …
Striving for the mirage of a writing routine: A guest post by Ashley Kalagian Blunt
I shouldn’t be writing this. I’ve had three viruses in recent weeks, and each have decimated me. The latest is lingering. Compounded with the chronic fatigue syndrome I’ve lived with since 2017, the effect is physical exhaustion that makes it …
Writing Nature: A Guest Post by Anthony Ham
In his book Silence in the Age of Noise, Erling Kagge, a Norwegian polar explorer, describes how, in 1986, he was sailing along the Chilean coast in the South Pacific when, sometime between midnight and 4am, he heard “a …
Breaking through the publication barrier: A guest post by Alice Robinson
I’ve been hanging around in the Australian literary world for quite a while – at least since 2015, when my first book came out. In that time, I’ve published two novels and have two more forthcoming with Affirm Press. I’ve …
Giving Voice to the inanimate in fiction: A Guest Post by Robyn Cadwallader
‘If your hurried heartbeat did not bind you to your swift smallness, you would know that affinity binds you to stone.’ Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman
I always begin to write not knowing what I’m doing. …