Normally, when people come along to a creative writing class, they are hoping to learn how to write better, not how to save the planet. A couple of years ago, I was teaching a Guardian Masterclass on ‘Storytelling Secrets’. Among those attending were three representatives of an international environmental activist network. They were young, casually stylish, energetic […]
Author Archives: tobylitt
JG Ballard didn’t write this. I wrote it. But I wrote it as JG Ballard. (I wrote it for a Birkbeck Arts Week event on Ballard’s non-fiction. My Birkbeck colleague Mark Blacklock is hoping to edit a Selected Non-Fiction, to expand on A User’s Guide to the Millennium.) In 1984, Ballard published a credo, What […]
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 […]
