Picture this: it’s a bright July morning, and you have the day to yourself. Your perfect writing spot is waiting for pages to be filled. It’s your time. But instead of enjoying this fact, you hear a little monster tell you that you ‘should’ get to the desk, hear him growl at you over...
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* Did you dream of being a famous and successful writer, when you were little? * By the time you reached the age you are now, how famous and successful did you imagine yourself being? * And when you really think about that last question, does it provoke an emotional or physical reaction? Tension...
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I’ve touched on gender issues in writing before but here’s a slightly different take on the same subject. What if the gender imbalance at the top of the literary tree – the higher proportions of men in the high-kudos publications and on the prize shortlists – is because women are more emotional? A prickly...
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So what exactly is EFT? Why do we think its a brilliant tool for writers and people who want to be writers? Let’s start with the basics. EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Technique. It’s sometimes called ‘tapping’ and is sometimes described as “acupuncture without needles”. From a personal familiarity with acupuncture, however, I...
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It would be wonderful, more than a decade into the 21st Century, to be able to answer this question in the negative, but recent figures released by VIDA demonstrate that one is much more likely to feature in the most respected literary journals if you are a man. For many of us women, this...
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The belief “I’m not a real writer” is one of the biggest emotional monsters living in the writer’s psyche. It’s not just new or unpublished writers who feel or think like this, ALL writers can sit in this category including those with several books under their name: journalists who wish they could write fiction,...
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