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Here’s the replay of our fun creative writing webinar designed to kick-start your most successful writing year. Your Best Writing Year: Key Insights from the Webinar Here’s what we [...]

I’m not sure that anything I’ve ever resolved to do at the start of the year has come to fruition. Something about the demands made by new year’s resolutions, the way they wag their fingers in my [...]

Stories play out in all sorts of locations. You might think of those venues for drama as a stage, where characters collide, declare their love or spit their vitriol. The stage itself seems to [...]

We had a fun creative writing webinar which we ran from our ​Venice Writing Retreat.​ Jo-Anne, Richard and Fred answered questions on aspects of writing, publishing, and the creative process. [...]

I’ve been having that feeling again. The sense that you exist on another plane from other people. That there’s no one on earth who can truly understand where you are right now. For the longest [...]

Here’s a three-finger exercise for you: what are the sinewy fibres that link conflict, character and climax? The question arose as I pondered my strategies for our latest foray into the wilds of [...]

Don’t feel guilty for focusing on your creative needs – your life may depend upon it My mother was raised a Calvinist, so I was taught that time taken for myself was indulgent, a selfish waste of [...]

I love being able to do this – it’s like offering you a magic carpet, and transforming you into a Venetian writer, practising your craft in a 16th century palazzo. Now in its eighth year, our [...]

There’s a flat, yellow rock I swim out into the ocean to touch each day. It’s where I acknowledge what I have, give thanks … and beg favours of the creative muses. I’ve always been a bit [...]

How did we get to December? Surely it was only last week that the other Joanne (Hichens) and I were swimming at sunrise beneath the towering cliffs of the Tradouw Valley. And warming up over a [...]

A theme that has turned up time and again in these little essays is the virtues of restraint and limitation. I’m not sure whether this is not something that applies in life in general – I suspect [...]

I wasn’t looking forward to Venice. I know – sacrilege, right? I wondered at myself. What did it say about me? Did it mean I was tired of life, as Samuel Johnson once said of London? But on our [...]