#WeAreOCA
The Open College of the Arts' blog
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creative writing
Don't be frozen, let your work go and get published!
Posted: 30/11/17 09:04 |
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Through my writers’ group, I’ve met far too many talented writers who are frozen with fear when it comes to submitting their work for publication. I can understand why; I went through it myself. For years I would whip up tsunami-sized excuses as to why my work wasn’t good enough to be inflicted on others. Then something happened: I finally let go of my fears and insecurities, and my work found its way into the inbox of a publisher.
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The child’s voice in adult literature
Posted: 17/10/17 09:41 |
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Getting the child’s voice right in writing for children is easier than using a child narrator, or child’s eye view in free indirect discourse when writing for adults. If you have a child narrator in adult fiction, you have to decide if the narrator is looking back with hindsight or whether they are pretending to still be the child they were. There are plenty of examples of both of these approaches and some narratives that fall between the two extremes.
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Making the most of a drama in the shower
Posted: 05/10/17 09:12 |
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Writing students do sometimes get confused about building tension, confusing it with conflict. Although these two aspects of writing both fiction and drama have links, and can be present at the same time, they are not the same.
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Study visit: From art to text
Posted: 04/10/17 09:58 |
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Join OCA tutor Liz Cashdan on the 19 November in Bristol.
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Quiet and loud narrative voices
Posted: 11/09/17 09:00 |
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One of the choices a writer has when telling a story is with their narrative voice. Although the voice can manifest itself in different ways during the course of a story, the premise remains central. The narrative voice has to grip onto the attention of the reader and maintain it throughout the story. But this is not an easy task to achieve.
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When a promising setting doesn’t provide inspiration
Posted: 14/08/17 09:45 |
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The book that really captured my imagination as a child was The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It mentions black spaces on maps – imagine! There actually was a time when the word Unexplored was commonplace, and Conan Doyle’s book was the adventure story of my dreams. I did think the premise extremely unlikely – a sheer-sided plateau, isolated, unexplored, full of prehistoric creatures? And then I went to Venezuela.
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Online as the default method of learning…
Posted: 10/08/17 09:26 |
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“Online teaching gives the tutor time to read and think deeply about the student’s assignment, none of which is possible in a workshop.”
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Who can write what about whom?
Posted: 18/07/17 09:31 |
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In the news recently, Anthony Horowitz reveals that his editor has warned him off writing a black character into his next book. As he comments, that would be a pity, because if he only wrote characters that he represented himself, he would be restricted to 62 year-old white, male, Jewish men living in London!
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Developing your voice: Part 2
Posted: 07/07/17 09:09 |
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In the second part of this blog I will be discussing how the ‘voice’ of the prose can be put across using the third person. You might think that the third person has such a sense of distance from the character that putting across a ‘voice’ in the text will be hard – even impossible. Not so! It just takes some craft.
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Questing your plot
Posted: 27/06/17 09:42 |
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All good quests need a map, and so do you. Not just any map, either – a treasure map, which will hide the plot secrets, lay the clues, and guide your reader through the dangers and dramas of their journey to a wealth of satisfaction at the end.
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