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!
Tag: writing advice
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Ohohoho! Saviours of the written word! As we look forward to a fan-frickin-tastic 2016 filled with a multitude of writerly insights and discussion, we’ve compiled a list of upcoming writing competitions scheduled for the year ahead. Included are details about word counts, deadlines and direct links to each event. If you’d like to add a…
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As prophetic dreams go, few are as discomfiting – due to their close proximity to reality – as one nocturnal epiphany John Steinbeck conjured up in the mid 1950s. A rare writer of uncommon integrity, with a deep resistance to commercialism and a supreme faith in the human spirit, Steinbeck felt the need to pen…
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How many of us have ushered the phrase ‘I work to live; not the other way around’, insisting that we believe this to be true even while we toil away at our desks for hours after hours? Apart from the general unpleasantness of finding ourselves caught in this corporate entrapment – which is entirely…
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This year, the Jamaican writer Marlon James won the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. In the aftermath of his win, much was made of how the manuscript of his first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was rejected almost 80 times before finally being accepted by a…
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Studying the daily routines of many famous writers, one is immediately struck by how many rely on physical exercise to support their mental cogitations. Kurt Vonnegut, for instance, favoured long swims at his local municipal pool, accompanied by “doing sit ups and push ups all the time”, while author Tim Leach has prescribed rock climbing…
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A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light
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Firstly, gratitude: Extensive thanks to Dan McGurty for his help with this piece. Musical epiphanies Musical epiphanies are fun. I mean specifically like when you just get a song where you never did before, which I often find happens when listening to the song in question out of its usual context – say you always listen…
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Man has an instinctive inclination toward communication and the written word. Indeed, it is writing that can be held up as the defining record of our civilisation – an enduring and expansive catalogue of human feeling, expression, discourse, thought, history and philosophy. Yet we are also drawn to the study of writing as an art…
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Writer’s Block. It sounds like a fearsome condition, a creative blockage. The end of invention. But what is it, really? Often, it’s created from conflicting, unhelpful desires – we want the writing to be perfect; but we also want the novel to be finished as quickly as possible. We want the words we write to…
nothing in the rulebook 