Do you want to learn about writing? You’re in the right place. This is a free writing course for complete beginners, or those who have written a bit but want to go back to the start – because they know they need to get better. Now is exactly the right time for you to give […]
Long-time followers of the blog will know that I’ve done some lyric writing (for Emily Hall and True Bypass, among others). Most recently, I’ve been writing with the extremely talented and funny Will Grove-White of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. His credits include Fleabag and Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. We wrote this during […]
A little advance warning – tomorrow the Writers Rebel website will start serialising a short book I wrote during lockdowns 1, 2 and 3. It’s called How to Tell a Story to Save the World. You may have seen a version of it here already, as a lecture I gave to Birkbeck MA and MFA […]
Long-time followers of this blog will know that I have a bit of a thing about the Brown Hare
Sea-Creatures We lie within the deep flow feeding constantly. We seep slowly beneath ice-packs green like peppermint tea. We feed and then when full, feed more until it’d ache to eat another mouthful. Float, totally replete. Sea-creatures stippling ocean twilights, flickering true blue fluorescence and glowing far down into the black. […]
Let’s be clear – I’m not casting the first stone. The first draft of this was called ‘Nine Ways I Have Written Badly’. I am certainly not without sin. And as they say in therapy groups, ‘If you spot it, you’ve got it.’ Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa, etcetera. Pride Pride (as any good […]
Welcome back. Well done for coming so far. That proves you’re developing as a writers. Writers stick with their writing. You now have three characters you’ve written about – the child, the grown-up and the person in disguise. Perhaps you based them on people you know. Or maybe you completely imagined them (everyone works in […]
This is important. This is one thing that you can often forget. (I do.) You will have a clear idea of then (the time of the action) and a clearish idea of now (the time of the storytelling), but you won’t think enough about what the events that have taken place in between then and […]
The simplest form of then is a date. If you put down 13th November 1866 at the top of the first page, your job afterwards (unless you’re writing steampunk or time-travel fiction) is only to include in the story what really existed on or by that date. Supposedly. The same goes for 13th November 2019. […]
The simplest approach to writing a story is to say that the now of the narrator is the now the writer is in – the today they inhabit. And, of course, being to do with time, this immediately becomes extremely complicated. Novelists feel most powerfully, and sometimes damagingly, the effects of making now the day […]
