Writing outlines is all good. Writing each day is even better. Finishing your writing is where it gets really hard.
There’s excitement when you start writing something new, and it doesn’t even have to be a novel! It could that pesky essay, or a poem or a short story. This also goes for all sorts of art: music, painting, sculpture, dance. Continue reading “Finish Things”
I must’ve been about eight when I planned my first ‘lesson’.
Lesson objectives were laboriously detailed in a little notebook. I would tinker around on whiteboards with mind-maps. The register was meticulously checked, even when the only ‘students’ in attendance were my stuffed animals (and thus the actual process of calling the register was rendered somewhat redundant). I was young, bright, and in love with learning – and more importantly, in love with teaching. Continue reading “Why Those Who Can, Teach”
We must move beyond simple claims that writing ‘gives voice’, or is a form of ‘expression’. Language is both before and after the fact: it comes as retrospection and speculation. And its politicization runs deeper than mere content, the surface upon which many young writers roam and remain. We must look at the container that holds the water. Continue reading “Speaking Language”
It’s hard to find a funny poet – it seems that the vast majority of us are doomed to sit around bemoaning the sad state of the world as it is/was/always will be. It’s even harder to find someone who can be funny without being either superficial or depressing. But somehow, despite the many ways the world has changed for the worse in the four years since My Family and Other Superheroes, Jonathan Edwards has done it: he’s got me laughing again. Continue reading “Jonathan Edwards’ “Gen”: A Human Comedy”
Screenwriting is a discipline most of us are unacquainted with before going to university. You may have a sound knowledge of film or television, know your Vertigos from your Borgens or your Mudbounds, and never have encountered a single screenplay. This is normal. Starting-out in screenwriting only requires ideas, and the drive and imagination to visualise them. Continue reading “How to Break Into Screenwriting”
We That Are Young is the debut novel from Warwick academic and human rights activist Preti Taneja. The novel is a modern reworking of Shakespeare’s King Lear, transplanting the tragedy from the castles of Medieval Britain into the meeting rooms of the hospitality industry in modern day India. It was awarded the Desmond Elliott Prize for new fiction in 2018. Continue reading “Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young”
The hardest part of getting your work published in literary magazines is not the submission process or finding the magazines, or even finding the inspiration: it is the motivation to start, and beyond that the motivation to keep going once the rejections start to pile up in your inbox. The same inbox that you cannot bring yourself to make a special email folder for because of the thick income of template ‘unfortunately, the piece is not for us’ from editors. Continue reading “A Brief Guide to Getting Published”
“The Smile of the Wolf” tells the story of two friends; Kjaran and Gunnar and how their hunt for a ghost turns into a struggle for survival, honour and love.
Tim Leach’s book paints a painfully vivid yet entrancing image of eleventh century Iceland. It is a harsh land whose people have laws to match. Yet it is also a beautiful land, a place of solace for those wanting to escape the yoke of kings. The setting reflects the story – the contrasts of the land embrace the contrasts of the characters. Kjaran is a skald, a poet, who has never killed but shapes the world with his songs. Gunnar is a battle-hardened warrior, who is often at loss for words. The delicacy and hardness of Iceland can be found in these two men. Continue reading “Review of Tim Leach’s Smile of the Wolf”
Jessica Kashdan-Brown is a current Warwick Writing Programme (WWP) student, poet, and writer, originally from Bath. Her current project, the Bath Canal Poetry Route, works with the help of the Canal & River Trust to place poetry in the locks of the Bath canals, such that the poem changes as the water in the lock rises and falls.
Continue reading “Poetry on the Canals – An Interview with Jessica Kashdan-Brown”
Not for the first time, it started with the creation of a world.
In that world you have dragons, flying cities, moving mountains and talking cats. You raise your eyebrows at the word “wizard” and instead create a unique magic system like the industry has never seen before. Your knights are men of honour, integrity and emotion. Yet all three of your points of view are male. Continue reading “Unrealistic Girls Swinging Unrealistic Swords”
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