Jo-Anne Richard’s blog

Writing can teach you as much about yourself as it can about the craft. Over the past weeks, I’ve been sharing with you the advice of a few of our mentoring participants – those who are writing a [...]

The middle can be the most daunting part of the book to push through. The beginning rushes out after you’ve been thinking about your story for months. But the middle is where writers get stuck, [...]

Twenty years ago, I was a young mother scribbling away in a back room. The next thing I knew, I was spirited away to launches in London, in Germany, all over South Africa. It was my first book, [...]

Last week, and in the next couple, I am featuring the writing advice of our mentoring participants – those who are finishing a first draft, in the middle or who have recently begun.

A year or two ago, I was approached at a book fair by a woman with an American accent. She told me a story I can’t resist sharing. Some twenty years back, while visiting London, Carole picked up [...]

In our mentoring programme, we have a number of writers who are either just beginning, in the middle, finishing a first draft or working on a second. I asked a couple of them to share with you [...]

In 1996 my first novel, The Innocence of Roast Chicken, appeared – and changed my life. Its success took me completely by surprise. The book shot to number one in South Africa in the week it was [...]

Just because something is “true”, just because it happened, doesn’t mean it’s a story. This came up recently because we were assessing a manuscript – a memoir – and had to give the writer advice [...]

A piece of writing is like a set of dominoes. Overset one aspect and you overset all those that follow. We come across this problem a great deal in our mentoring programme. Each scene follows [...]

If you’ve been trying to write, you will no doubt have been challenged to adhere to the holy trinity of writing advice: write what you know, find your voice and show rather than tell. The first [...]

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” – Pablo Picasso There’s a certain point at which writing skills must melt away and become part of your being, [...]

New writers often ask whether they ought to be writing “for an audience”. It’s a complex question because, deep down, we all hope to be read by someone other than ourselves. But when you start [...]