You mean you can analyse this stuff?
Tag Archives: Creative Writing
What can we learn about how to be funny on the page for good reason? (In other words, to be satirists.)
Welcome back. You have now – from inside you somewhere – dug out the three elements of a story. It should be one that you wouldn’t have considered writing, before starting this guide. Why? Because with each exercise, in each case, I have nudged you toward doing more than one thing at once. NEVER DO […]
You are a Starter, a Middler or a Finisher. There are others you might be – the Dreamer, the Planner, the Diarist, the Angry Person, the Wanderer-Around-the-Soul, the Cynic, the Copyist, the Poet-Semi-Converted. All of you, this blog is for you. I have written it out of my experience as a creative writing tutor, out […]
Either/Or/Or I am guessing you are one of three sorts of writer. Does this sound like you? You have hundreds of ideas. You have dozens of opening sentences. You have lots and lots of half-stories. You have a few stories that have even reached what you once hoped was the end, but which turned out merely […]
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 […]
Just so I have it all in the same place, I have compiled an incomplete list of former students on the Birkbeck Creative Writing MA and MFAs (some taught by me, some not) and what they’ve gone on to write MFA Students: Eva Aldea, Singapore, Holland House, due February 2023. Leon Craig, Parallel Hells, Sceptre, January […]
In this cut section from Wrestliana, I imagine giving my ancestor William Litt a creative writing tutorial, to help him improve his novel Henry & Mary. Scene: My office. Ah, William – hello. Come in. Yes, that chair. I always sit in this one, don’t know why. Fine – okay? How are you? How have […]
tobylitt 
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