I’ve just read a scary story about literary ignorance in Britain. Published at Ananova, some of the most frightening results of a survey of 3000 people are:

One third of people didn’t know Shakespeare wrote plays (many thought he’d been a king!)
A quarter didn’t know John Keats was a poet
And for me, the most shocking, is that more than two thirds didn’t know A A Milne was a writer. Hello?! Winnie the Pooh?!

The scariest part is that I suspect the results might be even worse here in Australia – both …

Despite my cat’s attempts to disrupt the big rearrangement of my novel, I’m making progress. We have my father-in-law staying with us at the moment, so time is scarce, but that means that when I have a rare moment home alone, I make the most of it – sometimes that’s more effective than having lots of time, anyway.
And that means that today I finished the rewrite of my first chapter. It still needs a lot of work but I was happy enough with it to print it out (I rarely …

I think it’s just lovely when I read newspaper articles about writers who’ve won awards with prize money that’s actually worth something. Writers seem to draw the short straw so often – as do many creative arts – because people do it because they’re passionate, and not for the financial reward. Yet a financial reward, and the freedom to live without being scared of the next bill coming in, while creating incredible books and stories and poetry that can change the world, is pretty important. Right?
Okay, my rant’s over now. …

My fiction writing has been a bit stalled in the last couple of weeks while other parts of life took over, but I’m finally starting to get those fingers back to the keyboard.
A trick I’ve used in the past, but had forgotten, is getting inspiration – and more importantly, motivation – from other art forms, not just by reading great literature or heading writers speak. This morning we visited the Year 12 Perspectives exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, an annual affair where the best artworks from art …

Not long ago I mentioned that nice new Australian prize, worth $100,000, known as the Prime Minister’s Literary Prize. And while that would certainly help a good Aussie writer to survive a couple of years longer without having to take another job, I was pretty excited to hear that an Australian author has just picked up a prize worth $880,000. That’s serious money!
Melbourne-based young adult writer Sonya Hartnett just won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish government.
She’s not a writer I’m familiar with – yet! – but according …

Earlier in the week I mentioned the Men With Pens post that reminded me I have to make characters that my readers will care about, and the Men With Pens gang mentioned there would be more character tips to come. True to their word, the latest post is about making your character flawed, and it’s another timely reminder as I prepare to sit down with my opening chapter this weekend.
The ideas I don’t want to forget from that post are mostly about leaving room for the characters to grow. That …

You might remember I’ve set myself a March 31 deadline to rewrite the first chapter of my novel. Of course, the first thing I realised is that until I figure out a good structure for the novel, I won’t even know what the first chapter is, but I have a pretty good idea of that now. (Admittedly only for the first half of the novel, but that’s a good start).
Yesterday morning I even woke up with some opening lines – even though I haven’t consciously been thinking about the …

My RSS feeder brings in all kinds of writing info and tips for me each day, most of which I skim and ignore pretty quickly because I’m always in a hurry to get to the actual writing I have to do. But this morning a post from Men With Pens (cool name, hey!) caught my eye.
In their post Fiction Writing: Characters Rule the Story, I got a good reminder about a mistake I was about to make with the first chapter of my novel rewrite. Characters are more important than …

So there I was, ready to sit down with the draft of my novel and find a way to completely restructure it. Perhaps I’m weird, but I’ve been holding on to this great packet of orange flashcards that I swiped once from a company I was teaching in, just knowing I could write scenes on them and rearrange them to create a novel. I pulled up my draft on Word and used one card to write a brief summary of each scene (and in the process discovered that about a …