Virginia Woolf on why writing isn't a craft
This is the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf [http://www.openculture.com/2016/08/in-the-only-surviving-recording-of-her-voice-virginia-woolf-explains-why-writing-isnt-a-craft-1937.html] . She’s reciting the opening of an essay on how to read literature, but there’s some incredible stuff on writing too. It’s a fascinating insight. I quite liked this pointed section:
How to build a fictional world
This is a great TED-Ed video by Kate Messner [http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-to-build-a-fictional-world-kate-messner]. And this is the important bit: > “Just like real life, fictional worlds operate consistently within a spectrum of physical and societal rules. That’s what makes these worlds believable, comprehensible and worth exploring.” It
How Ricky Gervais learned to write
There are two things I like about this clip of Ricky Gervais talking about the writing advice he received at school [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTJyDe7a2bo]. First, the larking about at the start and suggestion that no one writer’s process is any more interesting or important than
George Saunders on the mystery of storytelling
So if I’m going to start sharing the good stuff with you here on the site, it’s going to have to be the good stuff. And it doesn’t get much better than this video of George Saunders [https://vimeo.com/143732791] talking about storytelling and the writing
Some goals for 2017
I do tend to give myself goals at the start of each year, but I don’t often write them down and I’ve never shared then publicly before. But then this year does feel different, somehow. I don’t know why. Work I’ve spent the last year doing
Minimum viable podcast – how I showed my work and tested an idea
I made a slightly weird podcast called Leisure Club and I asked you what you thought of it. Here are the results.
Empathise
A few days before the EU referendum vote, someone close to me said that they were probably going to vote Leave. I was flabbergasted [http://www.iainbroome.com/blog/everything-burned]. First, I could see no logical reason for it. They were intelligent, comfortably middle class, apparently liberal-minded and entirely unaffected
Everything Burned
Flash fiction written in the aftermath of the Brexit vote in 2016. I will never not be cross about what happened that year.
Shelflife – a newsletter
Newsletters have been all the rage for a couple of years. I’m not saying I’m some sort of pioneer (I am), but I’ve had my own newsletter [http://iainbroome.com/newsletter] for quite some time. In the last few months, I’ve been taking it a bit
The end of the Write for Your Life podcast
I have currently recorded 157 episodes of the Write for Your Life podcast [http://iainbroome.com/podcast], the first in 2009 and the most recent, just before Christmas last year. Me and Donna [http://sorensenpoetry.com], my co-host for the last couple of years, have made a difficult and slightly