I am sure as a distance learner, you’ll likely be used to incorporating different technologies into your learning experience – I was certainly Zooming ‘before it was cool’ thanks to OCA meetings and I can’t help but notice how many learning tools we seem to be early adopters of. We’re also lucky to have […]
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We don’t have to know where a piece of writing is going to end up before we begin; this navigating, or finding our way, is often where the magic of a piece of writing arises.
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In this workshop we’ll explore the places we inhabit most, the views we see every day, the map we create on our daily walks. We’ll read poems and prose about place and spaces, and pay homage to the ones that we feel both connected to and stuck in.
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We’re living through increasingly strange times, and artists have an important role to play in articulating what is happening in the world. In this workshop we’ll consider how we can use our art to think and write about the future.
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Writing a book review is something that you’ll very likely be asked to do as part of your OCA courses in creative writing at some point. It’s a good way to begin looking at books critically, and it’s also something you could use to keep a record of books that you’ve read to help you decide what you really think of them!
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Has your writing ever surprised you? Have you ever looked at the sentence you’ve just written and been moved to laugh, cry, or seek out a professional that you can talk to about it? The art of surprise is something that writers have learned to harness, whether it be the twist in the whodunnit or the turn in the sonnet, and it’s a part of the writing process that should not be underestimated, and we all know the powerful effect a good surprise can have on us as a reader.
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If you’re studying creative writing, chances are that the idea of publication has crossed your mind once or twice. Depending on what you write, you might want to pursue the accepted path of applying to agents, who will represent your fiction or non-fiction to large publishing houses. However, if you write poetry or are interested in making a direct approach, you may be interested in this blog post, in which I explain a little about the inner workings of a small indie publisher. Having worked for several over the last few years, I hope that this piece can give you some insight. Here are my absolute top insider tips from a small publishing house!
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After a while, in my experience, the fear of not writing anything at all does tend to finally trump the fear of not writing anything good.
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So you’ve been trying to come up with some new ideas, or turning over that same piece of work for weeks now, and it just doesn’t feel like inspiration is coming your way. We’ve all felt like this, I think, and we can agree that ideas can come from the least likely places – something you overhear, something found in a pocket, a billboard on your drive to work – but what if you’re just not finding them? This post introduces a few ideas that are excellent ways of playing with words, freeing up your process and creating the circumstances in which new ideas might present themselves.
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A writing retreat is one way of giving yourself time and space to write, and committing to writing more seriously. It’s also an increasingly popular thing to do, perhaps because our working lives leave us little time to be creative, so taking enforced time out in a place where the laundry and the washing up are not going to be causing distraction can be a good way to really put the hours in on a particular project. With that in mind, I have a few pointers to help you to choose a good writing retreat, and to help you make the most of it once you’re there.
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