Tips for Writers

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 [...]

Fifty thousand words in just thirty days. It’s a huge and exciting challenge. Getting stuck? It’s a problem that most of us encounter from time to time. Here are a few suggested strategies for [...]

It’s a hard, lonely process growing your writing discipline… Oh shut up, you old killjoy. We don’t believe that. We’d much rather you had creative fun among like-minded companions, guided by your [...]

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 [...]

‘Where do you get your ideas?’ is one of the most frequently asked questions on our screenwriting course.  Aspiring writers hope to be told that there is a magic formula; that ideas can be [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Could your writing be better? Of course. Same goes for all of us. Here are links to ten pieces of sage writing advice. Since we are celebrating story this month they’re all about aspects of [...]