To find out more details about the transfer to The Open University see A New Chapter for OCA.
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Flash exists all over the world, and is known by a variety of different names which are often used interchangeably: flash fiction, micro-fiction, nano-fiction, sudden fiction, short shorts…
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On Saturday 24 October Vicky will be leading a creative writing workshop as part of Sheffield’s Off the Shelf Festival of Words. The first half of the event will be a leisurely stroll around Sheffield’s Cultural Industries Quarter, the second half will be a writing workshop where we’ll use the material gathered on the walk in a number of stimulating writing exercises.
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Following on from my recent blog about redrafting, this blog focuses specifically on redrafting poetry. It isn’t a list of rules, so much as a few things to think about to help bring out the best in your poems.
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Recently a student asked if it would be a problem that his redrafted work for assessment was considerably different from the pieces he had originally submitted for his assignments. I replied that it was absolutely fine – it’s assumed that students will develop their craft over the duration of the course.
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Do you have any advice for beating the procrastination habit? Or is it a necessary stage in the creative process?
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There’s a widely held perception that the sciences and arts are at opposite poles of human understanding and knowledge. Many people would suggest that science is concerned with objective facts whereas art is concerned with subjective experience.
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When singer-songwriter Nick Cave discovered he’d been nominated for an MTV Award, he sent a polite note to the organisers asking to be withdrawn: he did not enter competitions – his muse was not a horse. So why enter your own muse in a competition? There’s certainly no obligation to do so – there must […]
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‘Don’t wait until you know everything… Because you will never know everything.’
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There’s been a spate of films about poets in recent years and this got me wondering whether there was still something ‘romantic’ about the figure of the poet in the public consciousness – a strange idea perhaps, given the ever-diminishing sales of poetry. But how successful are films at showing the creative process of a poet, or encouraging viewers to actually read the poets’ work?
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Many writers use real people as characters – there are many other examples and this isn’t a new trend – after all, Shakespeare used ‘real’ characters too, from Cleopatra to English kings…
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