Patricia’s Blog
FT.com / Life & Arts – The art of good writing. I fret about writing a sentence: whether to make it concise, minimalist and pared-down or, exuberant and rhythmic to match the tone. Are the rules that dictate brevity and concreteness enduring? My new year resolution was to craft the best sentences I could. Adam…
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I was back on the hills this week, in the heart of the Galtee Mountains, at Lake Muskry; back to where the pulse beat of the walking helps to pattern the rhythm of story and words. Appropriately, it is the place of the ‘jewel mouth’. For folklore has it that the ancient name for Lake…
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I took my time about it but now I’m committed. I’m joining the post a week challenge. I suppose I could really have pushed myself and gone for the post a day. But my problem is that I can’t rush the posts out; I find I need to ruminate, let a post idea churn around in my brain…
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Jo Slade’s biography poem The Artist’s Room traces the artist Gwen John (1876-1939) through Paris at the start of the twentieth-century: ‘I looked for her in Paris…/ walked from place to place, lived the smells, the sounds, / followed a plan I’d drawn.’ A painter-poet, Jo Slade uses her artist’s eye to distill the essence of Gwen John’s…
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Only a day to go and I will start over. Another year. Another set of writing resolutions: nonfiction manuscript to finish; dig through more research; get back to writing morning pages. But an image has dogged me. A child in ringlets scraping a nib across a school copybook in a first attempt at joined up writing. Every letter,…
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How to Get Yourself Off Your Lazy Butt and Start Writing Already. Thoughtful and provocative suggestions in this Blog on starting and keeping a writing routine. Summed up in make it your goal that you will START to write. Maybe you have suggestions to add.
Read MoreI’ve nothing to say. What would I write about anyhow? My grammar would be all wrong. They’d laugh at me. All this at a recent writing class. And then there was a tea-break and the chat and the story-telling started and could have gone on all night. So you want to write but just can’t…
Read MoreThere are three commandments, James N Frey says, if you want to write dynamic prose: Be specific Appeal to all the senses Be a poet (but not too much of a poet!) Frey’s How to Write a Damn Good Novel is one of my well-thumbed books on writing: ‘A Step-by-step no-nonsense guide to dramatic storytelling.’ You can read a short interview…
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This is the first sentence of a new short story: ‘Her eyes were not exactly blue or grey.’ Alisa Cox – she who wrote the writer guide Writing Short Stories – has recently posted this (and three more sentences) of a new story on her blog. It whets the appetite and leaves me frustrated since I’ll have to buy the…
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I have a full shelf of Books on Writing and still buying. I had a few goes at making this selection, ended up with ten books, then had another go to get it down to the half-dozen I’m allowing myself. Along the way the criterion I used was this: which books have I reached across…
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