To find out more details about the transfer to The Open University see A New Chapter for OCA.
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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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I’m not quite sure why this is an issue that has only been coming up recently with students of mine. Perhaps it is because some are now later on in their assignments, and are challenging themselves with new, technical ways to tell a story. But more and more of my students who now write in the third person have been wondering about Point of View.
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In part one of this blog I discussed how planning for the story, including the environment it would be written in, set me on my way to write my first novel in six weeks. But once I had dealt with these problems the other big issue in my way was that there were many scenes […]
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Whatever our specialisms, as writers, visual artists and musicians, we should all be indebted to John Berger for his strong and thought-provoking ideas. I particularly like the way he called himself a listener and a storyteller.
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A short story is a slice of life, so it needs a narrow geographical location and a small number of characters. It takes work to produce the 500 to 6,000 words that ‘explore a mood, a pregnant silence, a seemingly mundane scenario that’s somehow charged with significance’ – novelist and broadcaster Marcel Theroux’s description of […]
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Last week’s Wikipedia blackout and journalist Johann Hari’s decision not to return to ‘The Independent’ put plagiarism in the news. But plagiarism, imitation, forgery, flattery, call it what you will, the discipline of writing in the voice of another writer is a good way to find your own voice.
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Jacky Fleming’s illustrations and cartoons have regularly featured in The Guardian, Big Issue, New Statesman & Society and Independent on Sunday amongst many other publications, books of her cartoons published by Penguin and her work exhibited far and wide. She kindly agreed to an email interview for the We are OCA blog. Did you always […]
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In case you’ve missed all the press coverage on this event, here’s the premise in brief: 1,000,000 books are to be given away by 20,000 book lovers on Saturday 5th March. 35 books have been chosen, from which you can choose the book you would like to give away to friends, colleagues, reluctant readers etc. […]
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As promised a few weeks ago here is another excerpt from the Jacqueline Wilson interview I filmed along with Livi Michael. Here Jacqueline talks about her career from writing in exercise books as a young girl through her Tracey Beaker success and beyond. By her own count she has now written almost 100 books!
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