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- First drafts: allowing the worm to navigate the soils of your mind
- The boy whose butter I ate: writing from the inside out
- All a writer can ask
- Throwing away material without a sense of failure
- Playful child and iron teacher: the two halves of the writer
- What happens when a character’s skirt gets hitched in her knickers?
- It’s an anxious job, pulling out of the comfort zone
- Write of things you love
- Try to get ahead too fast and you might end up with your trousers round your ankles
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Tag Archives: Writer’s block
Writing isn’t just about having an idea – you have to know what to do with it
I’m sitting at the bar of a coffeeshop in Amsterdam, scribbling away. A man, standing next to me, gestures at my notebook and says: what do you write? I’m actually writing about my notebook, I tell him. Some people who … Continue reading
Posted in Essay, Fiction, Memoir, Travel
Tagged Creative writing, editing, Fiction, Gabriela Blandy, how to write, Memoir, short story, travelling, Writer's block, Writing, writing advice, Writing process
18 Comments
Something to think about other than how crap you are
Jonathan Lee told me he can’t write in that beginning to end way we used to have to do in exams. He likes to cut and paste. I take a lot of guidance from those school essay writing days: sheets of … Continue reading
Posted in Essay
Tagged Creative writing, Gabriela Blandy, how to write, Jonathan Lee, Writer's block, Writing, writing advice, Writing Practice, Writing process
17 Comments
Perhaps we touch, my muse and I
My first sexual fantasies, age thirteen, were set in a boys’ school. I was the housemaster’s daughter, visiting on a stormy weekend, where an overnight dump of snow had left us without telephone or roads. I had started a fever. … Continue reading
Posted in Essay
Tagged Creative writing, creativity, fear, Freud, Gabriela Blandy, how to write, Joyce Carol Oates, Love, muse, Relationships, Rousseau, Writer's block, Writing, writing advice, Writing process
15 Comments
The art of becoming an original writer in three days!
We talk about that first ‘bite’ we get as a writer, the first punch of an idea. Something catches our eye – a painting, or a conversation between two people across the room. We watch. Suddenly we start to imagine … Continue reading
Playful child and iron teacher: the two halves of the writer
I was nine when a new games mistress arrived at my school. She was a grey-haired woman, although she wasn’t old; I could tell because her eyebrows were black. Her bum was boxlike, giving an impression of very little waist. … Continue reading
Posted in Essay, Memoir
Tagged advice, editing, essay, fear, Gabriela, Gabriela Blandy, how to write, Memoir, Writer's block, Writing, writing advice, Writing process
39 Comments
Swimming in lakes
The waitress must have been sitting on a small stool behind the counter because when I left my table to find the toilet, I only saw her head between polished yellow cups, a napkin dispenser, the small hand-painted bowl with … Continue reading
Posted in Fiction, Memoir
Tagged Autobiography, Lake, Stanton St John, Swans, Swimming, Writer's block
7 Comments
Gabriela Blandy - The sense of a journey 