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Blog

Read about my journey into becoming a creative freelancer, interviews and reviews with great authors, and advice on writing and creative living.

If there's something you'd like advice on or a book you'd like me to take a look at, do get in touch, I'd love to hear from you.

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Jun 2, 2019
4 min

A Week of Silence

“The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it…when the world’s filled up, we’ll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in.” Doris Lessing I spent almost all of last week entirely alone. No work, no friends, no family, no baby. No distractions. My very own writing retreat. At first, it felt strange. I noticed the passing of every hour. Teaching is hardly

Oct 22, 2018
3 min

Finding My Voice

Over the past few weeks, something strange has happened. In the tiny bubbles of time I get between work and baby, I’ve started to write again. At first, it wasn’t much. A few scenes that barely reached 300 words. Some thoughts, a memory, nothing substantial. But it was something. I opened up ‘stickies’ on my laptop. Down the right side of the screen is one giant note with all the days of the week, with enough for two months’ worth. I get to the end of the day and log how many

Oct 26, 2017
3 min

Non-Fiction (like pie) is your Friend

My shelf is in danger of falling down. We put it up to replace the bedside tables, so it hovers above our heads, laden with all the stuff I used to cram into those drawers. A basket filled with far too many tubes of half-finished hand cream, assorted earphones, toe separators, the tiny glass pig I brought back from China years ago. And, of course, books. At the moment I’m reading six. There are a couple of literary magazines, one novel, and four non-fiction books. Herein lies

Oct 2, 2017
3 min

All Change (Shift Your Focus to Re-Energise Writing)

The leaves on the tree outside my window are dying. But they are so beautiful in their death. Near the top, they still have green hearts, tinged with an acid-bright red. Towards the bottom, they’ve faded to yellow, as if dipped in custard. Every year this tree stands for months with naked branches. Not until March will I see the blossom falling like snow on the road outside my house. It’s not the only thing to have changed. My desk is now in a different room – the living room

Aug 11, 2017
4 min

Is Borrowing from Mythology Cheating?

When I was a student at University, I took a composition course. Bashing away at the keys of a piano in a quiet practice room (it was 11pm, I had homework due the following day), the impossibility of creating anything genuinely ‘new’ suddenly struck me. There they were, 8 little keys, with black ones in between. Surely there were only a certain number of combinations you could create with this limited palate? Listening to modern pop music (yes, I’m old) it would appear I was

Jul 1, 2017
3 min

Windows – The View from my Writing Desk

Each time I’ve moved in the last five years, my writing desk has always gone next to a window. In four different houses, in four different boroughs of London, I’ve looked out over the street for inspiration, a quiet moment, or sometimes just to be nosey. I did try having it in another room in the last flat I lived in. Technically it was near a window, although it looked onto a wall. It was horrible. I felt closed in, shut off, unable to write anything. Thirty minutes was abou

Jun 26, 2017
4 min

Unplug – How to Step Back from the World

On a dog walk with my sister recently, she vented an uncomfortable but pertinent truth. Why is it, she asked me, as we trudged through a bracken-crusted wood, that people throw themselves into work, spending hours and hours doing things that make them stressed and unhappy? More than that, the proceeds of this treadmill of misery is all too often spent on going a holiday. Yes, there’s loads of adverts for them on the TV at the moment. Tranquil corners of the world where you ca

Jun 10, 2017
4 min

Uncertain Times – How Can We Embrace Uncertainty?

The only thing that’s sure at the moment in UK politics, despite claims to the contrary, is that it’s an incredibly uncertain time. Managing that feeling, embracing it even, is something you will have to get used to if you want to continue to write. Perhaps, something you’ll need to embrace in many aspects of life. During the fallout from the election result, you could track the progression of public reaction. Initially, exuberance. A shift in the status quo, a challenge to e

Jun 5, 2017
4 min

Lazy Writing

Here it is at last. A stretch of weather we can revel in. Sunny afternoons, barbecue smoke drifting over fences, parks littered with bodies half-dressed. And all that time in the evening. So how do you make it productive? Every year I get excited about how much free time I’ll have. You’d think, after ten years of teaching, I’d know better. After the trudge and then the scurry with exam classes, desperately cramming to make sure they are prepared, big gaps start appearing in y

Feb 5, 2017
3 min

Making Creativity – How to Boost Your Creative Output

You can’t make creativity, but you can make cake. I have two days a week to write. Two glorious, empty, indulgent, frustrating days. Sometimes, the word count is high. My fingers are flying over the keys, I get to the end of it and bask in the glory of my beautiful sentences. Other times, I write pretty much nothing, then hastily dash out a blog, or do some Tweedecking (like DJing, but way less cool) in a desperate attempt to have something to show for an eight-hour stretch.

Dec 16, 2016
3 min

Taking Time Out – Retreat in Any Way You Can

December is upon us. While apparently the idea that time goes quicker as you get older is a myth (it’s just because you’ve seen more actual time, apparently) it still seems that the years are stacking up at a rate that I can’t quite keep up with. Every hour, day, week, month, I get to the end and sometimes it feels like all I have is a list of things I didn’t manage to do. People I didn’t see, projects I didn’t finish, marking I didn’t do, films I didn’t see, phone calls I di

Sep 23, 2016
3 min

On Finishing a First Draft

It is done. I have typed the last word, finished the last scene, put my (relatively) new characters to bed. In celebration of this, I wanted to share some piece that I figured someone would have written about how great it was to have accomplished this. Alas, I was wrong. All of the posts I found revolved around what comes next. Where to go next, how to edit, all of that stuff that I was really hoping not to think about for a few weeks. I can understand the need to focus on im

Oct 16, 2015
3 min

Foraging for Ideas

In the last few months, I’ve found myself running around Hampstead Heath thinking ‘I need to find an idea for a short story.’ Thanks to sites like Creative Writing Ink, I’ve got a monthly alert of short story competitions and deadlines for magazine submissions, all laid out on my Google calendar. The problem is, I don’t have that much of a back catalogue yet, so for each one I need to come up with something new. And, funnily enough, simply trying to think of ‘a story idea’ do

Oct 12, 2015
1 min

Let Me Clear My Throat

On finding the elusive ‘voice’ we all strive to find in our own writing and to hear in the things we read, and how blogging and non-fiction writing can be the route to hearing the version of yourself that you didn’t know existed. Read the article here. #writing #prose #literature #creativity #article #motivation #comment #productivity

Oct 5, 2015
2 min

Starting to Succeed

The very fact of this title was difficult to write. Acknowledging any form of success seems boastful, inappropriate. It’s a bit like singing. If you say you play the violin, the piano, it’s ok somehow, because the hours of practice are deemed part of it, you are a skilled technician, as well as an accomplished musician. Say you sing, and it’s a boast, a singling out. I am better than you because I can sing. You can substitute ‘writing’ for that. Probably because everyone (pre

Aug 14, 2015
1 min

The Enemy

The nugget of something Is there But in the act of putting it on the page It disappears No flare of wit or will Nothing to separate Me From all the other people struggling to take bits of language and string them together in a way that is meaningful Wavering in the face of the need to be Decisive Shadowed by all those Names and Ideas and Prose that people Praise Writer’s block Is simply the scorn of myself Nothing that can’t be seen In a mirror The wall that rise

Aug 5, 2015
5 min

Editing Backwards

I find myself in the glorious position of having completed the second draft of my novel. It feels infinitely more satisfying than the first. Then, I knew there was a mountain of work still to be done, endless shuffling about of scenes and ideas, and there was a long road ahead. Already, this one feels more polished and together, so although there’s still long way to go, it doesn’t seem quite as insurmountable. Thought I’d share a few thoughts on what worked for me. 1. Write i

Jul 23, 2015
3 min

Encouraging Thunder

Blogging sometimes feels like throwing a pebble into a tunnel/cave (insert metaphor of something large and dark). You tap away, have a flurry of excitement each time you put something up. Dutifully read by friends and family of course, but you’re never entirely sure that it’s reaching anyone else. However, it would appear that the little rock I chucked in has indeed bounced off a train (not sure about this now) as the wonderful Annika Perry has nominated me for this award. Yo

Jul 9, 2015
5 min

Wasting Time

Sometimes it feels like the more time I have, the less I get done. I’ve had an erratic work schedule for almost two years now, doing everything from paternity leave in a school which took up five days a week, to doing nothing but evening and weekend tutoring to make ends meet while I write a book and complete my Masters. It’s a strange sensation, not having fixed work hours, a fixed income, a steady schedule to take you through each day. It also ups the pressure at the time I

Jun 3, 2015
4 min

Office Politics

I’ve never worked in an office. I remember a teacher I used to work with swapping for a more ’normal’ job. She spoke of the euphoria she felt when she could go to the toilet, literally, whenever she wanted. Non-teachers don’t understand the true meaning of bladder control, that feeling when you look at your timetable and realise you can’t wee for the next three hours, or when it gets to 5pm and you suddenly realise you haven’t gone since 7:30am and you’ve drunk four cups of c

Sarah Scribbles