Blog posts about creative writing.
I’m taking part in Misha and Beth’s Five Year Project and my five-year goal is to write a novel and get it published.
First step: write the first draft.
This is my monthly recap on how I’m doing. Continue reading “5-year writing goal: first draft nearly done!”
Two weeks ago I opened the BMA News Review* and read an anguished opinion piece written by a doctor. She had just discovered nits in the hair of her young children and she did what many busy working-mums do: she blamed herself.
Sometimes we do something on the spur of the moment and it has unexpected consequences.
Last week I opened and e-mail and discovered I had won £50 of books.
Included in the e-mail was a list of titles, all Random House publications, from which I could make a selection. I wasn’t too upset that the majority of the books seemed to be about cookery. It was an unexpected and wonderful surprise!
What had I done to deserve Continue reading “Letter published: BMA News Review”
The Creative Zone is a magical place – but when we deliberately set out to get back into The Zone – guess what? We can’t find our way back. And the more we try, the harder it seems. If only we knew where it was… Does The Zone really exist as an anatomical entity in our brains? Where is it?
For writers, the Creative Zone is a wonderful place to be. The Zone is where everything seems possible, our thoughts fly free and words just flow onto the page without any struggle or effort. Although the work we produce in The Zone will need to be shaped and edited at a later date, it is in The Zone – this magical place – that we weave and spin the raw material that forms the basis of our finished writing. Continue reading “Writers: using the right and left sides of your brain”
Writing in The Zone is a great experience, we all agree. Here are the 7 signs you’ve arrived.
Can you tell when your creative juices are truly flowing?
Most of us experience moments when we seem to be functioning at a higher level – so bound up in our creative work we believe we are operating on a different plane from normal. When this happens, we often say we are in The Zone.
The creative zone. It’s a wonderful feeling.
Writing in The Zone is a great experience, we all agree. When you’re there you never want to leave.
But The Zone is an elusive place. You won’t find it on any map. Sometimes it’s very difficult to get to. That is why writing can be such a frustrating and challenging and heart-breaking task.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could always just slip back whenever we wanted to?
Read the next blog post, where I try to work out where The Zone actually is.
Writers: using the left and right sides of your brain.
My old novel had been a monster that had threatened to eat me alive. The new novel was going to be different. I was going to tame the beast before it got the better of me.
A couple of months ago I gave up on a novel I had been trying to write for a few years. I analysed what had gone wrong and listed some of the problems in a blog post: Why I Abandoned My Novel .
Giving up was a difficult decision to make and I spent some time convincing myself I was doing the right thing. In writing – as in anything in life – making mistakes is OK. This is how we learn. To stay cheerful, I found a great collection of quotes on learning from mistakes and many of these quotes come from some very good writers. Continue reading “Learning from mistakes: writing my new novel”
Ruth Livingstone 