Journal

I also talk about this on The Patchword Podcast on Spotify and on YouTube.Most of the benefits of entering writing competitions are only to be found if you are a winner or, at least, a runner up. So it’s important to make sure you maxi...

Blair Enns' comment that “writing is the process of sorting through what you think you know” – got me thinking about how important the actual process of writing is and why ChatGPT may not be going to replace you as a writer.While the excitement aroun...

It’s not enough for a writer to know what he intends telling his reader: he needs to be aware of background details and information about characters and location that may never be made public.I think it was Humphrey Bogart who told one of his leadin...

“Tone of voice” has begun to be a popular phrase in marketing circles, closely linked with brand and business storytelling. But before you go on to look at developing a specific tone of voice for a brand, you need to make sure that writing basics are...

Audiobooks: time-saving, accessible, engaging? awkward, inconvenient, forgettable? Some people love them; some people hate them. However you feel about audiobooks, their use raises questions that can be considered from both a scientific and a philoso...

Most writers realise that they could benefit from an outsider’s opinion of their work, which leads many indie authors to pay someone else to edit their manuscript. But unless both parties clearly understand what's expected, things may not go accordin...

Balancing the written and spoken forms of a poem.Media coverage of this week's US presidential inauguration has reminded me how some recent presidents have chosen to include poetry in their celebrations. It's also reminded me that I first became awar...

Even when you ask other people for help with your work-in-progress, the final decisions remain your own.An email from a member of a critique group I organise brought me up short. She’d attached a poem revision saying, ‘I have made the corrections sug...

There’s more to writing poetry than fitting words into a pretty patternIf you get a group of writers together, it’s pretty much impossible to come up with a definition of poetry that they will all agree on. One of my personal favourites describes poe...

Years ago, after talking to the Catalán poet Joan Margarit, I wrote down in my notebook:Form, metre, rhyme etc. are superficial elements of a poem. What gets translated is something more essential.Since then, I’ve given a lot of thought to poetry tra...

I also talk about this on The Patchword Podcast on Spotify and on YouTube.The easiest way to correct a text you've written is to leave it long enough to have forgotten it so you can come to it with fresh eyes. But deadlines are always looming, so thi...

In order to be a good speaker, you need to be aware not just of the words you use, but of how to use silence, and the way pauses can affect your audience. Writers, too, need to be conscious of how they construct texts to guide understanding and creat...

I also talk about this on The Patchword Podcast on Spotify and on YouTube.Do we control the language we use, or does the language we use control the way we think?Many of us — perhaps especially those who call ourselves writers — like ...

I used to curate a writers’ resource website that included a modern poetry anthology section and I received all sorts of poetry submissions from visitors to the site. Exercising my sweeping editorial powers, I rejected most of them out-of-hand as the...

Although Rob Mackenzie wrote his 25 rules for editing poems for Magma Poetry over ten years ago, they remain relevant. It’s hard to disagree with anything Mackenzie says, particularly as the list is followed by the rider, “good poets are always ready...