I hope, if you followed them through, you got something out of the last 10 Lessons. I tried to make them as accessible and useful as possible. I’ve collected below some resources for you to use to take your writing, reading and re-reading further. I am the Fiction Editor of MIR Online, Birkbeck College’s online […]
Welcome back. We started, 10 Lessons ago, with what you needed to be able to write. It turned out to be not that much. But what do you need in order to be a writer? This is how I usually put it: You need the intelligence to begin a story and the stupidity to finish […]
Welcome back. It’s Lesson 9, and we’re approaching the end of the Starting to Write Course. So, let’s think a bit about how to end a short story. To be honest, this is – like How to Be Funny in Prose – one of the hardest things to teach. I’d quite like some lessons myself. […]
Audio and video, good lord.
The Question In the final workshop of last term I was asked The Question. It was one of the Birkbeck Creative Writing MA students, Alex Petropoulos, who asked it. Come on, tell us what we really want to know – tell us The Secret. I was really on the spot. Did I know The Secret? […]
You may have heard that common piece of advice from Creative Writing workshops ‘Show, don’t tell’, and you have have wondered what it meant. Or you may know. Here is an example of telling – Sara was born in May 1996. Ten years later her mother published her first novel. It was called Jumping Jumping. There […]
Welcome back. You have three characters you’ve been writing about – the child, the grown-up and the person in disguise. Perhaps you based them on people you know. Or maybe you made them up from scratch but have been getting to know them better just through writing about them. In this Lesson I’m going to […]
In this Lesson we’re going to look at how suspense works. This isn’t because you’re going to be writing super-tense genre fiction – although perhaps you will be. This is because suspense of some sort is useful in all storytelling, and it’s best to have an idea how it works. Most stories play with different […]
Welcome back. I have already given you my definition of a story – A story is about someone who is somewhere they shouldn’t be. Or: A story is about something that is somewhere it shouldn’t be. And you have begun writing the nothing draft of a story. You have two characters who have found something. […]
You can go straight to Lesson 5.Writing dialogue is something many beginning writers either avoid or rush. It can be hard to see how you can rewrite dialogue. If a character has something to say, don’t they just say it? And if you – the writer – change how they say it, isn’t that cheating? […]
