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10 Ways Writing Affects Your Confidence
So, you’re in the shower (your best writing ideas always appear suddenly when you’re in the shower). You’ve been in there 15 minutes but haven’t even touched the bottle of Original Source raspberry shower gel yet because you’ve just had your best writing idea yet. You lather up quickly, grapple for a towel, almost trip…
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How to Do Marketing as a Writer: A Basic Guide
Are you a writer tweeting into the void? Emailing into the abyss? Posting story after story on socials and watching the link to your book disappearing, unclicked, into non-existence every day? Marketing your writing likely isn’t something you’ll have been taught as part of a creative writing course, nor is it something anyone really prepares…
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What’s The Best Piece of Writing Advice You’ve Ever Been Given?
I’m twenty-four years old. Despite the bright red curls, nervous smile and the smooth movement of tipping the cool pinot grigio to my lips, inside there’s a smaller version of myself running in circles around my head and screaming: ‘You’ll fall over! You’ll get out of breath trying to read! You’ll mess it all up…
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When can you call yourself a writer?
Do you confidently call yourself a writer? Or does the word feel alien on your tongue, somehow ridiculous when it comes out? If calling yourself a writer makes you bristle, you’re not alone. When I’m at the hairdresser, or the doctor, or making general chat with the checkout operator, whenever they as me what I…
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3 Lessons from a Year of Not Writing
The gauzy illumination of fairy lights reveals the coloured spines stacked along every shelf and bedside drawer. There, a poetry book preordered the minute the writer announced it. Here, an anthology produced from a previous commission. And just there, a thoughtfully-selected collection gifted from a friend, with the tiny cursive note forever inked onto the…
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The Power of ‘No’ for Writers
As a writer, we must always seek the word ‘yes’. We want editors to say ‘yes’ to those painstakingly-polished submissions. We want a ‘yes’ from the grant application for that great project idea. We want readers to say ‘yes’ when making the decision to buy our books or read our work. Likewise, we have learned…
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How Can Writing Help Your Mental Health?
A girl snaps on the bedside light and squints against its raw artificial glow. It is two o’clock in the morning. Already she’s dreading the next day at school: the laughter shuddering on a plume of cigarette smoke outside the gates; the laughter as she lurches clumsily onto the schoolyard and feels the deliberate thud…
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4 Common Writing Tips It’s Okay To Ignore
We love hearing about other people’s writing processes. And we adore hearing advice from big-name authors, holding onto their every word in the hope that if we just do things the same way they do – down to the number of coffees per day and their designated hours of writing – we’ll somehow follow that…
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New Year, New You: Change the Way You Think About Your Writing Goals
What have you achieved this year? Intensified by the hyper-filtered, rose-tinted reel of social media, many of us spend an inordinate of time worrying whether we’ve achieved enough. Perhaps the novel you planned on completing by June is still no more than a 1500 word document you mostly forced yourself through in the first week…
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Are Online Literary Events Really the Future?
It seems that for almost every day of the week, there’s an abundance of writing workshops, poetry open mics, book launches, courses and panel talks available to attend. It’s ironic that during these widespread restrictions, we’re actually no longer restrained by geographical location but can attend any event we please from all over the world…
Natalie Ann Holborow 