Archives

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 […]

 – 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]