Tips for Writers

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 [...]

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 [...]