Jo-Anne Richard’s blog

Yes, yes, you’ve heard this before. Be observant. Listen to interactions in the world, to the way people speak. That goes without saying. But your listening practice should go deeper. Listen to [...]

We all know the old writing truism: never tell when you can show. But I’ve recently come to realise that many people misunderstand what it means to “show”. I’ve come across those who believe that [...]

Back in the misty dawn of time when I was a working journalist, two jokey truisms were common currency among hacks. “I love being a journalist. You meet so many interesting people … and they’re [...]

I was asked the other day what I would consider to be the “most important thing” a novice writer can do to improve her creative writing skills. Besides read, I asked? Her jaw became set and her [...]

When I taught young journalists, I told them to stop halfway through their story and ask themselves: Am I bored? Last week I suggested a couple of questions you could use to interrogate a story [...]

When I trained as a journalist, I was taught to ask: So what? It’s an important question. You’re boggled by reporting on a large and complex event, trying to get all aspects of it down on your [...]

So you’ve worked out a story, and you think you’re ready to start. Only, there’s one decision you haven’t made: from whose perspective should you tell the story? There’s often not an easy answer [...]

“So there’s this woman, see? And she has a child from a previous relationship, but the father didn’t know he had a child. The mother of the child struggled as a single mother, but now the father [...]

Reading an unpublished memoir, sent to us for assessment recently, I was initially beguiled by an entertaining anecdote, with vivid characters. Ah, so far so good, I thought. But then we moved to [...]

“Everybody who writes fiction draws from their own life, but if it ended there, it would be very boring,” says writer, Judy Blume. I came across her advice the other day and it chimed with me [...]

I don’t know about you, but I heard a great many lockdown resolutions which included the words “book” and “finish” or “get on with”. And I’ve heard an equal number of retractions since. I don’t [...]

Events, even carefully described disasters, don’t trigger our emotions. Only people can do that. We once had a mentoring participant who asked if readers really cared about the characters. “Don’t [...]