Every Friday morning since the beginning of January I have been sending ten-minute freewriting exercises to my subscribers completely free of charge. Each one contains a new freewriting prompt plus some advice about how to go about using it (see some examples here). The prompts are specifically designed to work with the basic unit of […]
The artist Dorothea Tanning lived to the age of 101. Her long career as a painter, sculptor and writer is being celebrated now at Tate Modern in London. And what a celebration! For as long as Dali is better known than Dora Maar and Man Ray outstrips Lee Miller in terms of fame, the mounting […]
I’m excited to say that my post How to Use Freewriting to Supercharge Your Work is up at WRITE TO DONE, a great website that really does have “unmissable articles about writing”! I’d like to thank Laura, the editor, for having me as a guest blogger, and to welcome Write to Done readers to my […]
Every Saturday morning, in a side-room of the wonderful Kyffin Café Deli in Bangor, North Wales, I now have the pleasure of introducing people to the practice of freewriting. This is because I am running a course there, based on freewriting, called Spontaneous Creative Writing and eighteen people have signed up for it. Going back […]
As I wander around in cyberspace, dropping in on websites and blogs about creative writing, I often see freewriting recommended as a sort of emergency treatment for writers who are stuck, stale or blocked. I absolutely agree that freewriting is very effective for blasting through apathy, doubt and pedestrian thinking, but my approach, like the […]
This post is about stories in films and books, and in life. The stories we consume are very often structured in an artificial way, but we’ve become so used to the shape of stories in Hollywood films such as rom-coms and the superhero franchises that sometimes it’s possible to forget that life just isn’t like […]
This New Year, instead of making all the usual resolutions to eat less and exercise more, why not resolve to be bad and have fun writing instead? Writing need not be serious, and the things we do for pleasure are ones we do the most (box sets, anyone?) There’s no need to treat writing as […]
I am a huge fan of Austin Kleon. His advice to artists is to “show your work” or, in other words, to share the creative process in order to invite input, garner interest and de-mystify the labour involved. In this spirit I thought I would share some writing with you which is still in development. […]
If a historical novel is defined as one in which events from history are presented as they actually happened, then my unpublished novel Swimming with Tigers doesn’t qualify as one. The alterations I have made to the facts about the artists who took part in the Surrealist movement would make a historian weep! Sometimes I’m […]
Since 2006 I have been collecting quotes about writing in a pink suede notebook. Here are some of my favourites, in no particular order. I hope they inspire, entertain or delight you. “Description is the poet’s act of love.” W. P. Ker “Haste is the enemy of art. Art in its making and its […]