Writing Secrets: Fool yourself with files
I’m a great one for fooling myself, because so much about writing can make you sad. Saying goodbye to a great idea because it doesn’t carry your current story forward, or fit the personality of [...]
Writing Secrets: Write with more flow – use a character
New writers often write too formally – as we were taught to write at school. Remember those ghastly business letters? They certainly couldn’t be accused of demonstrating any kind of writer’s [...]
Writing Secrets: Excuse me, your theme is showing
Every now and again, we’re called upon to assess a manuscript in which the theme is pasted across it like a banner. I’ve set out to make people realise how badly dogs treat their humans in the [...]
Writing Secrets: Why boredom is good for you
I day-dreamed my way through my entire school career, and was consistently punished for it. I found the drone of the maths teacher’s voice created exactly the white noise necessary for me to slip [...]
Writing Secrets: Putting the intentions into practice
You’ve set your writing intentions – that was the easy part. But now we’re a week into the new year, and you need to start putting them into practice. The thing is … your mind is blank. You can’t [...]
Writing Secrets: See the world through a writer’s eyes
Face this holiday season like a true writer – become a critical observer of human nature. Record Auntie Pat‘s diatribe on the distressing nature of millennials, or her argument with Uncle Boet [...]
Writing Secrets: Pay attention to character … oh, and story, and …
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 [...]
Writing Secrets: Your worst nightmare can be your greatest gift
“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 [...]
Writing Secrets: Life is full of stories
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 [...]
Writing Secrets: It’s not only words which can offend
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 [...]
Writing Secrets: If being a writer takes magic, here’s the spell
“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 [...]
Writing Secrets: What does your character do in his spare time?
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 [...]
