We’ve had someone on our mentoring programme who has been struggling for months with a story, which just hasn’t been coming together. The main character didn’t ring true. We couldn’t […]
I’ve been thinking about sentences recently. They are, after all, the building blocks of every story ever written. We all love a good sentence, I think. I particularly like dazzlingly […]
One of our mentoring participants is busy writing a charming memoir about settling in a small community – trying to make friends and build a meaningful life among the sometimes […]
We all know people who think themselves morally or intellectually superior for reading non-fiction instead of fiction. And recently, the numbers of non-readers have been swelled by the digital [...]
The challenge I posed a group of scribblers was to write a scene in which a trivial disagreement masks much deeper conflict between two characters. How to insinuate the presence […]
One of our mentoring participants has held us in suspense for roughly 70 000 words. (In tranches of 5 000 words a month, that’s quite some wait). I’m not going to tell […]
Why do throngs of people around the world feel the urge to record their thoughts and feelings and observations, but, more than that, to shape them into narratives that engage […]
All About Writing’s latest writing challenge offers our most generous prize yet: a place on our brand-new online course, the Creative Writing Day by Day coaching programme, worth R2250, which [...]
I’ve been saying this a great deal to our mentoring participants recently: don’t weigh down your sentences. Don’t rush to get all you can into one sentence. Slow down, break […]