What I learned on a writing retreat
Posted: 10/07/19 09:38 | 5 Comments
With all that time to do nothing but write, you have to deliver, don’t you? Nope. This mindset is guaranteed to make you freeze.
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creative writing
Join the new OCA Book Group!
Posted: 02/07/19 09:57 | 1 Comments
The Book Group is running again! Sign up to have a relaxed discussion about books and writing.
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The problems of updating
Posted: 24/06/19 09:48 | 1 Comments
These days, online books get updated, and customers will get the newest version free of charge. Publishers want their contemporary fiction to be up-to-the-minute. But is there anything you can do to make updates unnecessary? Of course, it depends which genre you choose.
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A new leaf: writing and observation
Posted: 17/06/19 09:35 | 1 Comments
Write a paragraph describing the leaf in as much detail as you can. The only rule is you’re not allowed to use the words ‘green’, ‘red’, ‘yellow’ or ‘brown’.
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What I’ve learned from travelling around the world (in short stories)
Posted: 13/06/19 09:22 | 1 Comments
There’s a whole, diverse world of amazing fiction out there, and exploring it is a lot cheaper than other ways of travelling around the world.
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Ekphrastic Poetry
Posted: 11/06/19 09:39 | 1 Comments
It’s easy to look at a painting, for example, Van Gogh’s yellow bed and chair,, and respond with words. You might write a short story or a narrative poem about someone, possibly Van Gogh himself, who lived here. You might write a poem reproducing what you see in the painting, or something slightly more philosophical about bedrooms and their owners. But what do you write when the painting you are looking at is abstract?
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When is a collection of short stories a novel?
Posted: 06/06/19 09:35 | 4 Comments
It might seem obvious whether a book is a novel or a collection of short stories, yet I keep coming across books that seem to straddle both categories. So how can a book be both?
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Right up the bracket
Posted: 04/06/19 09:15 | 1 Comments
Parentheticals in a script are mini descriptions put into dialogue (in brackets), usually to describe emotion, or what the character is doing while talking, or the way the character delivers the dialogue.
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Join the new OCA Book Group!
Posted: 10/05/19 09:38 | 0 Comments
Do you like books? Do you like tea? Then join the OCA’s new online Book Group
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Writing about other species
Posted: 18/04/19 09:40 | 8 Comments
I’m currently writing a collection of short fiction exploring our relationship with animals. When I tell people this, they often ask me if it’s a book for children, and it’s true that many classics of children’s literature feature animals: Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952) and Richard Adams’ Watership Down (1972) all spring to mind, and if you search online for animal stories, many of the results are stories for children. But thinking about and appreciating the lives of animals shouldn’t be something we associate only with children.
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