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Exercises

Poetry Party

Write a poem about a big community event. This could be anything: a poetry festival, an open-air concert, a dance, a…

Jonathan Edwards
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Tips

Poetry and Community

When we think of poetry, we often think of ‘you’ and ‘I,’ the way that Shakespeare’s sonnets or the poems of…

Jonathan Edwards
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Tips

Inspiration for Stories

Incite 
You may find it helpful to start with an inciting incident, event or situation, which hooks the reader and triggers…

Elise Valmorbida
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Exercises

Springboard

Choose a news article that catches your attention and makes an impression on you. Use it as a springboard for an…

Elise Valmorbida
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Exercises

Exercise: Where to Start and Finish a Scene

You are often told as a screenwriter that to write a scene you should START LATE, AND LEAVE EARLY. But how…

Neil Biswas
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Tips

Tip: Rewriting from Notes on Your Script

Rewriting is a fact of life if you are a screenwriter. The sooner you master moving from one draft to the…

Neil Biswas
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Exercises

A Scene of Six Plus

Write a new story scene which features at least six characters, telling the tale from one participating character’s perspective,…

Elise Valmorbida
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Tips

Crowd Control

When you’re writing fiction or non-fiction, it’s tempting to stick with one character, or two. It’s less to stage-manage. And maybe…

Elise Valmorbida
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Exercises

Grow the Good When You Self-Edit

Find a section in your book or a piece of writing where you feel you have been really successful. Study it…

Jenny Parrott
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Tips

How to Approach Your Writing Fixes

We’ve all been there – something in our writing isn’t working, and now we need to deal with it. Sometimes it’s…

Jenny Parrott
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Tips

A Good Pitch

The transition from being a creative person who writes in the privacy of their own home to becoming a published author …

Jo Unwin
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Tips

Writing the Difficult Stuff

‘What would you write if you weren’t afraid?’ Mary Karr asks this question in The Art of Memoir and…

Lily Dunn
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Exercises

Writing Secrets

It can be difficult to access challenging emotions. What if you are driven to write with power and truth about a…

Lily Dunn
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Exercises

Efficiency and Space in Short Stories

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
This 6-word story is often credited to Hemingway. Observe, if you…

Tom Vowler
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Tips

The Short Story: Implying What is Absent

Much is made of the need to compress the narrative in a short story. Our canvas, by definition, is finite and…

Tom Vowler
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Exercises

Desire and Mood

If I’m struggling to capture an intimate scene between characters, I find it helpful to focus on desire and so I…

Maame Blue