Tagged Articles for CRAFT

22 August 2010

Forget those creative writing workshops. If you want to write, get threatened

"I've been writing for a living for around 15 years now and whatever method I practise remains a mystery. It's random. Some days I'll rapidly thump out an article in a steady daze, scarcely aware of my own breath. Other times it's like slowly dragging individual letters of the alphabet from a mire of cold glue. The difference, I think, is the degree of self-awareness. When you're consciously trying to write, the words just don't come out."

The Guardian

02 March 2010

Beware of Your Chair

"Your chair is your enemy.

It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you."

Stand Up While You Read This!

19 October 2009

Never Underestimate the Power of a Great Story

Wardrobe (The Closet) - Canal plus

06 October 2009

A Very Public Short Story

Max Barry was asked to write a short story in public at the Melbourne Writers festival.

"The longest I ever sunk into the story before remembering that people were watching was about 45 seconds. Often I would be halfway through a sentence and someone would stop by to chat or offer suggestions or ask where the bathrooms were. Which is what I signed up for, of course: this was meant to be interactive. But it was like being woken from a deep sleep eighty times an hour. Two parts of my brain that don’t normally meet were knocking into each other and I wasn’t sure which of them was me."

A Short Story Broke My Brain

10 July 2009

Whom do you trust to read your work?

"One of the great attractions of author events is the opportunity to find out how a book came into existence; how it began as an idea, how that vision was developed and nurtured, and eventually how it became pages glued between covers. At a packed Waterstone's Piccadilly last week, Glen David Gold – author of the bestselling Carter Beats the Devil – explained the genesis of his second novel, the patchy but utterly enthralling Sunnyside. And while the discussion of his approach to research, plot and character was fascinating, it was a question about his wife that elicited the most intriguing glimpse into the writing process."

Guardian article

03 June 2009

Stories We've Seen Too Often

This list is part of the submission guidelines for Strange Horizons, an online speculative fiction magazine. It is, however, applicable to most genres.

Strange Horizons

04 May 2009

The Joy of Exclamation Marks!

Stuart Jeffries writes: "Exclamation marks used to be frowned upon. Now look what's happened! We use them all the time! Hurrah!!! But what is it about the age of email that gets people so over-excited?"

Guardian article

21 February 2009

I am, You are, He is...

"While reading a novel, as the author describes the main character washing dishes or cooking dinner, we will often create a mental image of someone in the kitchen performing these tasks. Sometimes we may even imagine ourselves as the dishwasher or top chef in these scenarios. Why do we imagine these scenes differently - when do we view the action from an outsider's perspective and when do we place ourselves in the main character's shoes?"

Psychologists look at how pronouns influence the way we imagine events being described.

Yours, mine, ours