Jo-Anne Richard’s blog

One of our participants once asked whether readers cared about characters. “But don’t they just care about a jolly-good story? An exciting plot which carries them along?” Well (we told him), the [...]

“See what you’ve already written as raw material.” This is the kind of advice writers dread… “What do you mean? Thousands of words of deathless prose – raw material?” Yet, I believe it can [...]

Random events occur in our lives all the time. We make choices, we react to them, they are followed by unconnected occurrences, with no links to what came before or after. It’s only in retrospect [...]

Someone I know recently had a fall-out with a relative – over words that seemed to her trivial. For a time, she couldn’t understand it at all. After all, what she’d said wasn’t so terrible, was [...]

“I need to discover whether I’m a writer or not,” one of our participants said, at the start of our new Creative Writing Course. She said it in hushed and reverential tones, as though it were [...]

What books does your character read, if any? We all know, or we should, that one of the most crucial parts of writing fiction involves developing your characters. Build them, grow them into whole [...]

How do you feel about large forests in rural Sweden? Or deserts, for that matter, or large cities? Actually, I really don’t care what you, the writer, feel about any of them. (Unless, of course, [...]

Every now and again, we come across people who are hesitant about learning the craft, thinking that it will interfere with their joy in writing. It will make them feel stilted, they believe, halt [...]

No matter where you are or what your circumstances, you can find a way to write. It can seem daunting at times, and that’s where we come in. We undertake always to be there to help in whatever [...]

Are you old enough to remember that old Robert Altman move, Nashville? There’s a poignant scene in which Keith Carradine takes the stage to sing the haunting, I’m Easy, for his married bandmate, [...]

I recently gave a workshop at which I was called upon to introduce a young writer to the idea of darlings – and particularly, how to murder them. She wrote a lyrical passage with much to [...]

When I was a very young student, a lecturer of mine – something of a Svengali, if I think about him now – asked me why I wanted to write. I burbled something about my passion for expressing [...]