Pop Until You Drop
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]It was 1995, and I’d just started my new job writing SpeakUp Movies: booklets designed to make original-version commercial movies comprehensible to Spanish-speaking students of English. A large part of the work involved writing an English-Spanish glossary to the screenplay. This glossary was to include notes on anything that we thought needed explanation or clarification: […]
How The Creative Process Works
Lying on my yoga mat, focussing on my breathing, focussing on releasing the almost crippling tension in my neck and shoulders – suddenly it comes together. Dots join. It’s like a little explosion in my head. It happens instantaneously. That’s the creative process. I could never have arrived here by logical, linear thought. Only when […]
A Story of Mine
“Tortoise had become so demoralised by other, faster, nimbler animals bullying him that he lost all his self-confidence. Instead of feeling calm and unhurried and savouring every instant of Now, he yearned to be fast like cool, streetwise Hare. It’s not good to be a tortoise, he told himself. So Tortoise went into a decline, […]
Love Your Characters
The essential element of powerful fiction is not a twisty plot, pace, tension, effective writing… you can do all those things and still not engage the reader. The absolute key thing is that your reader CARE about your characters. Period. And how do you do that? By caring about them yourself. And how do you […]
Slinky
“What does ‘slink’ mean?” Robert asked me. (Apparently he was trawling through the entire list of English irregular verbs.) As usual, I’m unable to give a straight answer / translation. The word immediately conjures up a picture in my head: feline, silent, sinuous, leopard print, black leather… that old Shania Twain video… “Like this,” I […]
Weaving Text
In a recent post we looked at how the creative process has many stages, and how writing is no exception, and how each stage requires different skills and tools. And how, when we get stuck or frustrated with our writing and maybe beat ourselves up, it’s often because we’ve forgotten or are unaware which stage […]
What a Vase from Portugal Can Teach Us about Writing
This vase was bought my late parents many years ago on holiday in Portugal. How did this vase start life? As clay. Formless and colourless. So how did it become a vase? Someone had an idea in their head – a design – and probably sketched it on paper. And then the potter had to […]
Flipchart
I needed a flipchart (back in the dark days before I had a smartphone). And I could not for the life of me remember how to say it in Spanish or Catalan. Actually, I don’t think I ever knew. The dictionary turned up ‘rotafolio’ which I’d never heard before, and nor had the people in […]
Big Mind Join Dots
Yesterday, on the way back from the shops, an idea hit me – a section of plotline for the second novel, which is currently mostly a bunch of freewrites and crappy drafts. You know that feeling, that holistic feeling when dots are suddenly joined in your head, or pieces of a puzzle that have been […]
Picasso for Writers
I’m going to be brutally honest here: writing is scary. It’s one of the big reasons we procrastinate. That said, it’s taken me years of attempts at meditation, mindfulness, NLP, Ekhart Tolle etc etc to even begin to detach a bit from my thoughts; to observe what happens between a thought and the response to […]