Category: Blog
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Book Review: First You Write A Sentence by Joe Moran
‘First You Write a Sentence’ by Joe Moran is a mixture of advice, mostly good, and observation, which I found less interesting, probably because, as a writer, I am always looking for the former. Advice is of course just that: you can take or ignore it according to the context and circumstances. Useful advice includes:…
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A Personal List of Writing Guides
Here is a selection of the best guides to writing fiction that I have discovered to date. I will be adding my thoughts on each on this site over the coming months.
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What Makes a Good Story?
Story, rather than plot, is the reason that we read fiction. As Stephen King says, ‘it’s all about the story,’ whereas he describes plot as ‘the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.’ There are no firm guidelines on what makes a good story. If you were to ask the opinions of a…
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Stationery: An Important Choice for Writers
Although the final product of an author’s work is assembled electronically, pen and paper remain important everyday tools. They provide an immediate, accessible facility to record notes, sketches, dialogue and narrative in a structured or unstructured form, regardless of location and power supply. The decision of which notebooks and pens is something not to be…
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SALAD: Southend Area Local Authors’ Day Saturday 7th July 2018
Along with many other local authors, I will be participating in the 2018 Southend Area Local Authors’ Day (SALAD), part of the Southend Festival 2018 Literary Events. This is an ideal opportunity to meet local authors, share stories and experiences of their writing and yours, and to buy their books. Participating authors from a number of…
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Ambient Literature – The Route to a New Reading Experience?
The Ambient Literature project, to quote from its website, is: ‘… a two-year collaboration between UWE Bristol, Bath Spa University, the University of Birmingham and development partners Calvium, Ltd. established to investigate the locational and technological future of the book. Funded through a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project is focused…
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B S Johnson and the British Avant-garde of the 1960s
This Guardian article, reminding us of the avant-garde British writers of the 1960s, is interesting for several reasons. They were maligned by their more conventional peers, possibly for their attention to form rather than content, yet today we are not fazed by such experimentation; indeed, it is welcomed, to the extent that such novels are…
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Essex Authors’ Day, Chelmsford, Saturday 17th March 2018
I thoroughly enjoyed the Essex Authors’ Day, on Saturday 17 March at Chelmsford, Essex, library. An Essex Book Festival event, it featured over forty local writers giving talks, readings and ‘Meet The Author’ sessions. All presentations were free. My talk on ‘Writing Speculative Fiction’ was well-attended. I described a number of sub-genres and offered suggestions…