Writing Blind One thing I always find fascinating is reading about the evolution of a particular piece – about the how and why considerations of travelling from A to B via Z, that might result in an author tossing the lot and resuming somewhere around G. Such a seemingly haphazard way of working initially made […]

FLASHES Short & Short Shorts & Flash Of course there are plenty of guidelines for the writing of short fiction. And a normal moth sticks to the rules. For a while. Sometimes I wonder if rules take the form of those tiny cardboard pyramids, ten dollars from Coles. A sticky surface entices the hungry moths […]

Why I Need Writing Deadlines I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by. ― Douglas Adams I guess my mother’s death was my first writing deadline. I was 27 and working as a Customs Officer in Fremantle at the time: boarding ships at sea, securing bond stores and sitting on […]

Recently I read an interview with the English writer, Hilary Mantel, which got me thinking about the role of the author in writing historical fiction. Mantel is a rigorous researcher (which, being a researcher myself, I admire) and insists on the novelist’s duty to stick to the facts, as they’re set out in the history […]