nothing in the rulebook
A collective of creatives bound by a single motto: There's nothing in the rulebook that says a giraffe can't play football!
Category: Professor Wu’s Rulebook
Opinion pieces; blog posts; articles
-
“We should learn to treat literature as doctors treat their medicines, something we prescribe in response to a range of ailments and classify according to the problems it might be best suited to addressing,” say the creators of an excellent video explaining what literature is for. Centuries previously, Galileo observed that books have an uncanny…
-
About the artist Dougie Dodds can be seen as the embodiment of indecisiveness, but currently considers himself to be an illustrator and writer, with a keen interest in medieval and viking sagas. He has a BA in English Literature from UEA, and is currently working towards an MA in Authorial Practice:…
-
Nothing in the Rulebook launches a new web comic series from illustrator Dougie Dodds as he embarks on the choppy seas of a postgraduate education into the arts. Come see the artist as a young man do battle with his old foes; fusty student accommodation, impending deadlines and that old hair-puller, writer’s block. Here, Dodds…
-
When Kurt Vonnegut proposed for his Ph.D thesis statement that “stories have a shapes which can be drawn on graph paper”, it was rejected as by his university. According to Vonnegut, the reason for this rejection was that “it looked like too much fun”. The idea that it is possible to visualise the way stories…
-
Over the last decade, the Oxford Junior Dictionary has cut a suite of words from the natural world, including “buttercup”, “acorn”, and “mistletoe”. They have been replaced by the language of the digital age – “broadband”, “cut-and-paste”, and “blog”. A question that surely arises from this is what effect such subtle changes in our curation…
-
If you’ve checked out our list of writing competitions and want to try your hand at something else, why not explore the world of Flash Fiction websites and magazines? Whether you want to call it micro-fiction, sudden fiction, smokelong lit, short-shorts or flash fiction, writing stories under 1000 words requires dedication, skill and applying new…
-
In October 1954, Ernest Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. And, although he chose not to attend the ceremony (being as he was still recovering from two consecutive plane crashes that had almost killed him), we can still hear him reading lines from his speech, as he recorded it in his own voice…
-
For writers, artists and creative spirits alike, the issue of confidence – or lack thereof is as important as it is complicated. The way in which creatives align their relationship with their own work, and whether they feel confident in it or doubting, can be said in many ways to define any successful creative endeavor.…
-
English spelling is undeniably chaotic. There’s an exception to almost every rule, 26 letters have to do the job of around 44 phonemes, and ‘English’ is less its own language than a strange combination and mixtures of myriad other languages both ancient and modern. The linguistic fingerprints of thousands of people can be found everywhere…
-
James Joyce wrote lying on his stomach in bed, with a large blue pencil, clad in a white coat – and composed Finnegans Wake with crayon pieces on cardboard. Conrad Aiken worked at a refectory table in the dining room; Robert Graves wrote in a room furnished only with objects made by hand. Ernest Hemingway wrote…
nothing in the rulebook 