How to tackle new writing challenges
Stepping out of your comfort zone as a writer can be daunting, especially when faced with a new genre or format that seems beyond your current skills. In both this blog and my next [...]
Monday Writing Motivation: Rocket Fuel for Your Writing
Rocket Fuel for Your Writing: Inspiration and Motivation for Writers by Richard Beynon contains a series of writing craft essays for authors and writers with additional notes and writing [...]
Monday Writing Motivation: The Gosling Symphony
This is a story about a clutch of goose eggs, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and the eternal struggle between hope and despair. You might remember my tale last year about the Canada geese that [...]
Monday Writing Motivation: The fly in a writer’s ointment
You’re writing a story. It’s the one you’ve been dreaming of for years, the one you’ve been planning for months. You’ve written chapter one. The story stretches out before you to the sunlit [...]
Writing Motivation and Inspiration: Three cheers for our characters
Let’s have fun today thinking about the difference between real people and the people we create for our fiction, our characters. I’ve often pondered the nature of the reality of fictional [...]
Monday Writing Motivation: lessons in people watching for writers
We’re sitting in a Pret a Manger somewhere in Farringdon having coffee and keeping a wary eye on the weather. We have an appointment in thirty five minutes across the road, but the forecast has [...]
Monday Writing Motivation: The adventure begins… now
The Guardian last Saturday carried a series of short interviews with people who’ve been diagnosed with terminal diseases of one sort or another. I took a deep breath and read some of them. Each [...]
Launch into a new writing year creatively
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 [...]
Monday Writing Motivation: The secret to good writing
During my end-of-year-break, I’m reposting old blogs: the 100th, 200th, 300th and 400th in the sequence. I’ve become more and more convinced over the years, and my writing career, that Keats was [...]
2023 in review: Celebrating the words that emerge from a community of writers.
What moved me most during the course of 2023 was not the publication of the book Step Back and Leap, which I co-authored with Patrick Mork; nor indeed the success of our annual writing retreat in [...]
Monday Motivation: What has natural history to do with writing?
During my end-of-year-break, I’m reposting old blogs: the 100th, 200th, 300th and 400th in the sequence. This, my 200th Monday Writing Motivation, was inspired – as many subsequent ones were – [...]
2023 in review: How a writing community became a lifeline
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 [...]
