By Sue Fleming Give yourself time in your life for your writing and do justice to your muse! Preserve the ideas as they come to you – scribble them down, cut them out or scratch them on the wall! Read, read and read. Always draft and re-draft your work until it shines like summer. Proof […]

By Paul Greenway I always open my Travel Writing Workshop with this first rule of travel writing (although I ignored it myself).  While it is possible to make money writing travel articles for magazines and websites, it is unlikely – but certainly not impossible – that you’ll earn a decent living. But you can at […]

By Michelle “Prakky” Prak That’s right – it’s time to embrace the digital age and often Twitter is a neglected resource for writers. Prakky shares her top five tips on how to best utilise Twitter if you are a writer.  1.       Follow and interact with other writers. Twitter works best as a place to have […]

By Sarah Lindblom Working from home as a writer can be a dream! Flexible, convenient and productive – you are the envy of your friends who spend hours a day commuting to work. A brilliant idea! Start a business from home… Two weeks later you realise that you have not left the house or your […]

Recently, we held a Life Writing/Memoir Bootcamp. We offered participants an opportunity to showcase a snippet of their work on our blog. Here are some pieces from some very brave souls. Biographical Achilles in Fearful Momentum by Terissa Sheperd Memories may be selective, heart driven, sense driven, ego driven.  There is a natural ‘papering over’ […]

By Simon Collinson You’re a young writer. You have ideas and ambition, and even a few pieces of writing sitting in a drawer, but no idea where to send them. Sound familiar? Getting work published is a dilemma for writers of every age, but is particularly severe for younger writers with little experience in the […]

By Piri Eddy  As the saying goes, ‘Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction.’ But for most of us, our lives don’t consist of car chases and explosions, or thrilling plot twists and tensely built narratives. Heck, most of us don’t even split our pants down the middle bending over for a dollar on the sidewalk. […]

By Barbara Santich  It might come as a surprise, but food writing is not really about food. Food is not usually the main focus. More often, food writing is about people and their experiences of growing, sourcing, cooking, offering and eating food; it’s about their relationships with food, their memories associated with food, the place […]

By Steve Evans We all form opinions, and more or less continuously. You finish reading a book and ask yourself, would I recommend it, and why? Perhaps you began to realise early on in which direction such thoughts were heading. On the other hand, maybe you got part way through and were later surprised at […]

By Steve Evans We are all creatures of habit. Sometimes we try to shuck those tendencies—give up smoking, be fitter, become a better friend, learn how to write a bestseller. Sometimes it seems we are offered, if not a miracle cure, then an easy way through. No-one is immune to the temptations of inside information […]

By Jennie Cumming Thanks to the proliferation of specialised websites and zines, short fiction has become more popular in recent years. Because of the time involved in providing feedback on each other’s work, the writing group I belong to restricts the monthly submission from each member to about 1500 words. We critique no more than […]

By Walter Mason I recently did an event with author, psychotherapist and healer Sharon Snir and I was struck by how she described her writing as a way of making peace in the world. I am used to the idea of writing as a form of therapy, or of social and political expression, or even […]

By Walter Mason  I’ve never really been much of a one for big things. Even though I come from Queensland, the lure of big things, grand vistas and sublime moments has never really been felt. I have always focused firmly on the small, the domestic. It is this perspective which grounds me, and which I […]

By Threasa Meads In his memoir, Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov says: Neither in environment nor heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life’s foolscap. By […]

This is a snippet from a brief talk I’ll be giving at the SA Writers Centre this Thursday on the subject of what editors do.  Whenever I tell people I’m a book editor, and the conversation doesn’t swiftly move on, their first question is usually, ‘So what do editors do?’ Their tone is that of […]