Writer Opps Wednesday is back, and pleased to share two development opportunities in Dumfries and Galloway, and three magazines looking for your writing to publish: Writers’ Gathering Which is run by Wigtown Festival Company. This is what they say: The Writers’ Gathering takes place on Saturday 11th May 2019, 9:30-16:30, in The Print Room, Wigtown. […]
Tag Archives: writing
Story-a-Week #9: Memoir and Monsters
For last Tuesday’s Café Stories I put together a lesson that combined memoir writing and plot types. There are umpteen theories on the range of narrative structures, but to keep it simple I stuck to the one that holds there are only 7 Basic Plots, and that all creative texts – films; novels; short stories; […]
Story-a-Week #8: The Art of Losing
Another hard won story which started in the Café Stories workshop on Tuesday. We did the art of writing about place. The setting for a story is more than merely a backdrop for the action, when done right it can tell your reader a great deal about your character, and help move the action on. […]
Story-A-Week #7: On a Dig
I’m a day late with this post for a stew of reasons, the culmination of which being I couldn’t get any purchase on this week’s story until I woke on Monday morning and realised what it was about. Then had to rewrite it. Stephen King is right, I think, writing is akin to excavation. The […]
On Becoming Unstoppable #2
Last Friday I wrote about my goals, and priorities* which, Benjamin Hardy argues, are paramount to becoming unstoppable. I followed his advice and listed the things I do every day in order to ascertain, by my behaviour, what my priorities are, and came to a tentative conclusion that my goals and priorities are, if not […]
Story-A-Week #5: Myrtle Davis is Lost
I said in Friday’s post that I had written a complete story in the course of my first Café Stories workshop. I realise now that I only felt it to be complete. I knew it needed work, nothing comes out perfect first time, but not quite as much as it actually does. Distracted by other […]
On Not Being Frank
I’ve heard tell from multiple people – some who knew him, some who teach him – that Frank O’Hara took his typewriter everywhere, and would prop it up on any available surface, in whichever situation, to write a perfect poem. He was famous for doing this at parties: cigarette attached to his bottom lip, he’d […]
Literature Ambassador: 2019 Writer Opps #4
Comedy writing prize: Comedy Women in Print. This is what they say: The Comedy Women In Print (CWIP) prize is an exciting new literary award created by Helen Lederer to bring female comedy writing the exposure and recognition it deserves. From burgeoning new talent to established writers – CWIP has no barriers and will shine […]
Literature Ambassador: 2019 Writer Opps #3
Two new magazines and a competition – get writing! 404 Ink is relaunching its magazine 404 with new project officer Imogen Stirling, and is looking for submissions of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry on the theme Space. This what they say about that: Issue 5 will be released in July 2019 and will be based on […]
Story-A-Week #3 What She Doesn’t Like
A couple of weeks ago I overheard a woman telling another woman everything she didn’t like about the menu they were looking at in the window of a café. Some days later I read a few stories in Lydia Davis’s Varieties of Disturbance. Last Monday I had to outline my story for the Story-A-Week Challenge. […]
