Blank pages. You know what they look like, right? Empty, white space? Wrong. A blank page can be full of things. Daft people – optimists and the like – might say they are full of possibility. But a blank page can be chock-full of insults, jibes, and taunts too. Just look at what a blank page says to a writer. You can tell…
Category: Writing Tips
The Cynic’s Guide To Blogging
Tomorrow is my 1st bloggerversary bloggaversary Blogiversary! (Pause. Wait for silence). It is, though. On 9 July 2013 I started blogging about book sales, writing for money in an environment where there is no pay for writing, and other things generally in the book and writing worlds I felt like poking fun at. Anyway, I thought I’d celebrate…
On Blogging, And Memories Of Those Who Never Were
Following on from my last post, in which we discussed online personas, factual or ridiculous, I’ve been thinking about a couple of characters I dearly miss from blogging misadventures past. One very talented writer whose blog I love (thank you, Elaine Canham) suggested that whatever personal stuff writers say about themselves online could just be made up. This made me…
Top 5 Asinine Excuses For Not Writing
Good Friday, gentlepersons. I’m ending this working week with my top 5 excuses for not writing. Perversely, they include, well, work. But that’s not the point. Because I have so many writing projects I intended to have finished by now, and my success rate is only marginally better than that of an Irishman at a speed dating…
Does Writing Ruin Your Writing?
In a recent episode of Lena Dunham’s Girls, Hannah, the main character, quits a lucrative day job writing advertorials, because she’s convinced it will stifle or kill her creative writing abilities and prospects. Granted, this character is only 25 (and often mental). But many people do believe that writing in another style, kills their style. In…
6 Reasons Why Writers Need To Stop Bloody Whining
There’s a lot of talk at the moment about earnings in the arts – or to be precise, the lack of them. This article from The Guardian is particularly whiny. It literally does depict an author in his garret. If it weren’t for electricity, you might imagine him setting his fingerless gloves on fire whilst trying…
On The Satisfaction of Not Making Your Money From Writing
In this rather disturbing article, The Guardian points out (amongst other hairy statistics) that 77% of self-published authors are making less than £600 per annum. In another article, the figures are a bit different, but no less pessimistic: it states that the median income of authors has dropped from just £6,000 13 years ago to less than £4,000 per annum. This means that…
5 Book Trends for 2014
In this post (and, following some suspicious yoghurt, this one) I pretended to have a look at what was going to happen in 2014, but now I’d like to do it for real. What fads and fashions will we see in genre fiction in 2014? Will fantasy lose its dystopian and grimy-fingered grip on the bestseller market? And that age-old question –…
Be Afraid! It’s An Irish Writer’s Christmas
I was half way down a bottle – sorry; er, glass of port the other day, when it occurred to me that nothing sells like an Irish writer’s horrible Christmas. The bleaker the better. These are not “but we were happy” stories; these are stories where nobody is safe. Endings are sour. And nostalgia exists merely to be rammed…
Guest Post: The Emotional Heart of The Story
Today I have a guest post with great writing tips from the multitalented Catherine Brophy. Catherine is an Irish writer, story teller, broadcaster, teacher, lecturer and workshop facilitator. She has written four novels, numerous short stories and scripts for both film and TV. She’s at http://www.catherinebrophy.ie when she’s at home. The Emotional Heart… it sounds like the title of a love story.…
Tara Sparling writes 