Poems! This is National Poetry Writing Month. Let's see a poem a day from each of you. Even a limerick. Even a haiku. Even a couplet. Even a found poem.

POEMS.

I am writing thirty poems this month about my hate for toast. You can write about anything or nothing. Just write them and post them.

Disaster movies, how we love them? Nope? Well, good thrillers are a well established genre and although a happy ending is a crowd-pleaser, it's not compulsary. In science fiction also, there's a tradition of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic writing.

All of which is a short prequel to a gratuitous reference to the Large Hadron Collider (has it ( Read more... )

I'd like to do a few muse moments on blog writing. Although you probably won't make any money from it, a lot of successful authors do have blogs and it can be a great way to connect with an online audience and network with other authors ( Read more... )

So we're into August now and the holiday season is under full swing.

Do you find you do less writing during the summer, or any other particular season? Summer is just a likely candidate with warm weather, longer days, people tending to be more sociable.

What do you do to try to keep yourself writing? And do you write on holiday?

So, is there anything about writing that you really hate? Authors you can't stand? Reviewers who make your skin crawl? Anything about the whole process that just makes you want to climb back into bed (assuming you left it in the first place) and pull the covers over your head?

This is your chance to rant!

An obstacle for any professional writer is that sometimes you have to sit down and write when you don't really feel like it, because if you don't write then you don't eat ( Read more... )

The tone of a piece can mean a lot of things; it can be formal/informal, solemn/playful, comedy/tragedy, enthusiastic/patronising, old-fashioned/edgy, happy/sad, and so on. Some tones are more appropriate for different kinds of writing. An academic paper is usually formal. A music blog/magazine is usually enthusiastic and edgy ( Read more... )

Are there some styles that you particularly like or dislike? Do you think you have a distinctive writing style? And does it matter to be distinctive?

Do you have any regular routines that help you with writing?

eg. Do you always sit down at the same time of day to write? Do you try to write at least X number of words a day? Do you always use the same pen? Do you make coffee first? Do you have a 'space' of your own where you do your writing?

If so, how do the routines help?

There is an on/off fashion for authors to start each chapter of their book with a quotation. I haven't seen this for awhile and it always risked being pretentious. (Did Watership Down really benefit from quotes from Auden as a chapter heading? Who knows? But as a kid, I remembered them and did later read the poem ( Read more... )