Month: April 2016

What a privilege to spend a day with Carmel Bird at the Newcastle Writers Festival 2016!

Joined by a small group of keen writers, we discussed inspiration, the elements of short story writing, created our own short stories and were honoured to explore our creations in a one-on-one tutor session with Carmel, as well as sharing our work with each other.

It was loads of fun with some friendly rivalry as we vied for Carmel’s prestigious shortlist and a crack at winning the first prize: the amazing Yellow Eggcup! Congratulations to the winner by the way!

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and soaked up the atmosphere of inspiration and creativity, which has strengthened my motivation to keep on writing!

Thanks Carmel for sharing your knowledge, humour and a wonderful day.

The writing group to which I belong, the Hunter Story Creators presented a session at the 2016 Newcastle Writers Festival.  The session was titled ‘How to Make Your Writing Pop’.  My part of the presentation offered an approach to self-editing your work.  My writing mentor, Karen Whitelaw cites someone who calls self-editing, Brushing Away the Sand. My approach to brushing away the sand includes eight (8) steps that I personally include in the self-editing process. I’m happy to share them in the hope that you may find them helpful.

I go through my story and look for the following:

1.  Changes in tense.  It is easy to unwittingly change tense in a short story.  For instance, you may be writing in present tense: She lifts the lid off the saucepan and stirs the soup.  Bill comes into the kitchen and asks, ‘What’s for dinner?’  She wiped her sweaty brown and…

Today we presented at the Newcastle Writers Festival. My presentation was titled, Expressions of Emotion. These are just some ideas that helped improve my writing that I will share with you.

In case you missed our session, here is my transcript!

Thank you Jessie, hi everyone.

At the moment I’m addicted to writing short stories so I always find the time to write because I enjoy it so much. I usually enter my stories into local and national competitions. Some of my stories capture the attention of the judges, whilst others don’t. So when I’m reviewing my stories I like to read the reports by judges so that I can get an idea of what they’re looking for and also to help me find ways of improving my writing so that it will stand out from the crowd. A little while ago I read a report by Jennifer Mills. Jennifer…