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Maybe because of my struggles with my own writing, I’m highly sensitive to the struggles of other writers. I  love mentoring, because like a midwife, I enjoy the immense satisfaction of helping [...]

 – Joanne Hichens My year of writing: difficult, exhilarating, satisfying, frustrating, on track. The difficulties? I’m easily distracted by Netflix and friends and chores and generally [...]

What moved me most during the course of 2023 was not the publication of the book Step Back and Leap, which I co-authored with Patrick Mork; nor indeed the success of our annual writing retreat in [...]

During my end-of-year-break, I’m reposting old blogs: the ​100th​, 200th, 300th and 400th in the sequence. This, my 200th Monday Writing Motivation, was inspired – as many subsequent ones were – [...]

How did we get to December? Surely it was only last week that the other Joanne (Hichens) and I were swimming at sunrise beneath the towering cliffs of the Tradouw Valley. And warming up over a [...]

Over ten years I have written – as I recently announced with a little fanfare – some 500 Monday Writing Motivations. I’m currently taking a break – but thought that it might be fun to keep your [...]

All About Writing’s latest flash fiction challenge offers the winner a literary assessment on 5000 words of writing worth R 2900 / £ 170 or a voucher to the same value to use on one of our [...]

A theme that has turned up time and again in these little essays is the virtues of restraint and limitation. I’m not sure whether this is not something that applies in life in general – I suspect [...]

The August/September flash fiction challenge was a simple one. Remember, it read: Write a scene in which your character finds themselves in a crisis/emergency situation. Show us how they respond. [...]

One of the themes I keep returning to in these Monday meditations is that of motivation – motivating your character, that is. Your character is, let us say, a mild-managed middle-aged man who in [...]