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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]