Emma Darwin's Blog, page 10

One-Day Workshop on Writing Historical Fiction 10th Oct

So, would you like a workshop preview - including one-to-one feedback - based on my forthcoming Get Started Writing in Historical Fiction? Then come and join our one-day course in Writing Historical Fiction, on Saturday 10th October, at Leith Hill Place, deep in the ravishing Surrey Hills. Leith Hill Place is a delightfully informal, friendly-feeling house; my (distant) cousin Ralph Vaughan Williams grew up here, and until recently it was still owned and lived in by the Wedgwood family. I was there last weekend for the first time, and it's the most beautiful and historic setting: you can see for...

Why the Creative Writing A Level shouldn't be axed

Only a few years after it was introduced, the Creative Writing A Level looks likely to be abolished, and I think that's a big mistake, as well as a great shame. I should say that I've no particular axe to grind, as I don't teach A Level and don't plan to start. But I do have an MPhil, and a PhD in Creative Writing myself, I've taught it at the Undergraduate level for the Open University, and my first book about Creative Writing - Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction - will be published by John Murray Educational in March...

All the posts I mentioned at the York Festival of Writing 2015

As ever, in among a mini-course, two workshops, a dozen one-to-one meetings and several dozen informal conversations, sober and otherwise, that made up my weeked at York, I mentioned a fair few blog posts that might be useful to someone. If you want to get a flavour of this year's festival, veterans Debi Alper and Andrew Wille have posted about it, aspiring writer Jo Hogan has written very sapiently about what she learnt from her second festival, and this is a round-up of my impressions from past years. But, really, York is all about writing better. So here are a...

Creative thinking, creative writing, Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction, and all that (Darwin) stuff ...

What with finishing Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction (the copy-edited manuscript has just landed on my desk) and the way I keep acquiring new writers to mentor, I've been thinking a lot lately about not just creative writing, but creative thinking. It's what writers don't necessarily have in common with literary critics, and may have in common with geologists. It's what choreographers have in common with farriers, and mathematicians with symphonists, and architects with historians. And it's what my physicist grandfather Charles had in common with his composer cousin Ralph, and their shared ancestors Erasmus and Josiah ... Leith...

Guest Post: In Praise of Sentences, by Barbara Baig

You probably know how cross I get when I hear of writers being told that they should stick to short sentences. I suspect it's sheer cowardice on the part of writers and teachers who haven't bothered to learn to control a long sentence, but it's also terribly stupid, because it deprives your writing of the energy and variety that you need if you're going to tell your story as effectively as possible: any writer worth their salt needs to be able to handle any kind of sentence. And it's doubly-terribly-stupid if you're ever trying to evoke other voices in narrative...

Jerusha Cowless, agony aunt: "Can it be anything but a bad sign to feel sick of the thing you're writing?"

Q: Oh, Jerusha! Can it be anything but a bad sign to feel sick of the thing you're writing? I've done well with children's fiction - prizes, sales - and now I'm tackling an adult novel. My agent's feedback is very positive but we've agreed that before it goes out large parts need not revising or editing, but full-on re-working - new scenes, settings, characters - which I'm now doing. I don't know if it's just that I've had such a bumpy ride with this adult book but I have a sense of just wanting shot of it now. I'm...

My best tip of all, whatever you write

A couple of days ago, on Twitter, @joseordoneUT asked if I had any tips for a new writer. As you may have noticed, I don't really do tips on here, partly because as soon as I think of a tip, I think of a reason why it's not always true, and before I know where I am two more paragraphs and a set of bullet points have unrolled themselves out of my fingers. But of course, as soon as I thought "I don't do tips", I remembered a good one. Write your first draft for yourself, your second draft for...

Solving mis-takings in your story: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em

What do you do when the right word - phrase - action - scene - is something which the reader might take the wrong way? Anything from tripping up on a word, to hooting with laughter at a moment of high drama? The other day, writer Graeme Talboys posted this on Facebook: OK. I know this is very first-world anorak writery stuff, but in my latest work I have a psychic who is also illiterate. The problem is, I keep using the term 'read' to describe what she is doing and it is beginning to jar in my head. Is...

All the posts I mentioned at the RNA Annual Conference 2015

I had a lovely day on Sunday at the Romantic Novelists' Association Annual Conference. The RNA are a glorious group of professional authors who have been at the forefront of fiction for fifty years. They have a remarkable history and a vast appetite for writing, talking, drinking, wearing great shoes and professional development, and supporting new talent on the New Writers Scheme. I was asked to give a workshop on The Writer's Voices, and, as is the way of such things, I ended up mentioning various blog posts, as places where there was more detail than I could go into...

The Itch of Writing Bookshelf 6: I Capture The Castle, by Dodie Smith

Click here for the full (or, rather, rapidly filling) Itch of Writing Bookshelf, and if you're looking for books to help with your writing directly, then click through to Books for Writers. I CAPTURE THE CASTLE, by Dodie Smith Cassandra Mortmain is seventeen, and has decided to keep a journal to practice her speedwriting, in the hope of being able to get a job. She, her older sister Rose and schoolboy brother Thomas live in a tumbledown castle in Suffolk, which their writer father moved into in happier times, after the succ��s d'estime of his Finnegan's-Wake-like novel. Then he succumbed...