The Creative Identity

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I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotion. –James Michener– It's weird to have your own writing quoted back at you. I think that we are all well-used to famous quotations and never quite think about our efforts surging to the level of unforgettable, snappy prose that shall grace mugs, screensavers and the covers of spiral notebooks (I surely hope mine won't, I can't stand spiral notebooks). But it happened to me once, as I was browsing on Twitter, and someone liked one of my posts on here so much as to sending it out into the ether as a tiny extract. Weird, I thought, sounds familiar. We're never gonna know about outstanding writing when looking at our own. I once gave an essay to someone who said he found it extremely amusing which shocked me because 'to amuse' surely was not one of my intentions (but... I wasn't displeased to hear of another's reaction, mind you). So today let's try something odd for a change. Write a snappy one-liner fit for a bookshop's marketing paraphernalia and then write a story or an article around it. Read more →

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The wastebasket is a writer's best friend. –Isaac Bashevis Singer– I've been working with books this week and I've come across books I never even knew existed, books that I know well and books that were published recently (or relatively recently, thirty, forty years ago) and are already out of print. Not that one needs to wait that long of course; a book can go out of print much more quickly than it took to enter production. And so I thought of my first few attempts at writing, stuff that I wrote when I was ten and that I finished, whatever 'finishing' means in this context, three months later. Sometimes I think of those writings and I am always convinced that, one day, I could salvage some of it and re-use it. Maybe today is that day. Find a very early piece of your writing, preferably years old, and use it as a springboard for something new. Read more →

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People love to see their heroes suffer. –David Bowie– The Manchester Literature Festival is about to start; the Knutsford one begins today. Agents and publishers are hobnobbing it in Frankfurt and the Nobel Prize has just been awarded as well. It's been a week of all-systems-go and I've been writing like there was no tomorrow. I've clocked up 7,000 words in four days and I've got another 3,000 to go starting in five minutes. On Monday I shall tell you of my little 'house arrest' experiment and how it yielded both tears and lots and lots of pages, but for now I shall leave you with a little exercise. You've just won the Nobel Prize! Write your speech. Read more →

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Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle, les souvenirs et les regrets aussi... –Yves Montand– October today my dear reader. The more I think about it and the more my life is full of regret. And the quicker time passes, the louder I scream, 'Wait for meeeee! Wait! Wait!'. I was talking about this very thing on Wednesday evening during the weekly chat we have on the eCourse. I spoke of an odd feeling regarding these regrets of mine; I am young enough not to have reasons to regret a thing and lucky enough not to have experienced great tragedy. So what is it? Then I was told to use the feeling and do something with it. Do you regret anything at all? If you do, write about your reasons and then write about what you are going to do to turn this feeling into the light that leads the way. I am going to do this one... Read more →

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It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. –Anne Frank– I've got a little journal that I bought years ago. It's for children, The Aspiring Author's Journal, but despite its target market, I have to say that it's very, very good for adults too. It provides countless prompts (366 to be precise, so not, technically, 'countless' but you know what I mean...) of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Today's exercise is lifted from the journal. What do you think you would have written at six in reply to the prompt's question? What about now? What will you write when you're eighty? Do you think that human nature is basically good? Read more →