I was sitting on the back deck with a cup of tea when the bell rang at the nearby school. The interesting thing is that I referred to it as a bell in my mind despite the fact that it was, in fact, a loud, electronic boing boing, similar to the generic doorbells we have all over the place.
I found myself reading a book the other day. Speed reading it actually. And then I suddenly realised the absurdity of what I was doing. No, delete ‘absurdity’ and insert ‘stupidity’—it fits, as you’ll see.
A recent client told me that it was impossible for her to write creatively unless she was drinking alcohol at a steady and (to me) frightening rate. I knew she was fairly pissed during her writing spells because she would call me in an extremely slurred fashion to let me know.
The more people I’ve helped to write, the more obvious it’s become to me that writing about oneself is enormously therapeutic. “Well, brilliant, Watson,” you may snort. “That’s a well-worn fact and everyone knows it.”
It was great to see Kate and Kristina talking about the book I coached them on appearing on TV this week.
“DIETING IS ALL IN THE MIND
Ever thought ‘Why can’t I shed those extra kilos?’
In my last article we looked at how much fiction was based on real life experiences. Since then my wife, Jane Teresa, wrote a blog about A Nightmare on Elm Street, a theme she had been asked about on a radio talk-back show.
How much of our fiction writing is drawn from real life? How often do we base our characters on people we know? And are those places we invent actually drawn from childhood memories, or somewhere we’ve once visited, or a bit of both?
There are a couple of books by Oliver Burkeman that I became acquainted with this month—yes, I do tend to find authors I really like and read everything they’ve written: Help!
I love referring clients to Julian Barnes’ Sense of an Ending. To me, that pithy novella and winner of the Man Booker Prize 2011 represents all that is good about contemporary writing.
I’ve become a little irritated in this era of modern communication where folk (even older generations) regularly, if not persistently, omit capitalisation from emails and text messages. Why? Is it because it’s easier for our hard-pressed fingers to move more speedily, saving time so we can rush off to the next fifteen second activity?
You can’t be much of a writer if you’re not a reader. And you should have read sufficient of your genre if you intend to become good at it. It’s a bit pointless writing historical romances when you only read sci-fi, don’t you think?
In Michael Hyatt’s blog about five ways to find time to read, he comes up with some useful ideas. You can read the blog post here.
Finding reading time seems to be a real problem for many avid readers.