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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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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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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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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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Collaboration: Your Free, Powerful Writing Tool
We’re naturally drawn to gossip. Writing rivals? Intriguing. Feuds with publishers? Tell me more. Drama over book awards? Let me pull up my seat. But working together with other writers to create truly unexpected pieces of creative work? Yawn. No one wants any of that. Yet in times where social media trolling is rife, tensions […]
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You’re Never Too Old (Or Too Young) to Start Writing
Can we talk about the word “emerging” when describing writers at the beginning of their writing careers? When you hear “emerging writer”, what age are you imagining the writer to be? For too many of us, we’ve been led to believe that to be an emerging writer is to be young and usually fresh out […]
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Going Out With A Bang: My Top 10 Final Lines in Poetry
We talk a lot about our favourite opening lines in literature, but for me there’s something quite laudable about the delivery of a killer final line when it comes to poetry. As poets, we must seek to ensure that every word is necessary. Every word and punctuation mark must have earned its place. Unlike fiction, […]
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How to Perform Your Poetry Despite Nerves
When I first decided poetry was my chosen path with writing, I’d gone into it assuming poets were the reclusive ones. As far as I was concerned, it was the novelists who did the big readings and were thrust into the spotlight; poets were quiet creatures, letting the lines in their verse do the talking. […]