Literary Leicester 2025 Podcasts

 

You can now listen to podcasts of the brilliant events at Literary Leicester Festival 2025 here.

These include:

• The Creative Writing Student Showcase 2025 here. Speakers included Sonya Hundal, Anna Walsh, Joe Bedford, Aidan Trulove, Laura Besley, Olivia Peachey, Kimaya Patil, Cate Morris, Shauna Strathmann, Daneil Hibberd, Nina Walker, Aarini Mehta, Sandra Shaji, Dave Clarke. 
• The "Bullying, School and Power" event, with Morag Edwards, James Scudamore and Jonathan Taylor, here. 
• The "Voices from the Other Side of Hope" event here. 
• Kit de Waal on The Best of Everything here. 
• "The Air We Breathe: How to Write about Our Air and Our Future" event here. 

And there are many others!

Masterclasses and Guest Lectures, Autumn 2024

Here is this semester's programme of Creative Writing guest lectures and masterclasses happening this term in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester. All the events are free and all but one are open to everybody: students, staff and the public alike. If you'd like further information, please email Jonathan Taylor (jt265@le.ac.uk).

Gavin Esler: "Writing the News & More": A Writer's Workshop

Wednesday 20 November 2024, 4-5pm, room TBC

Gavin will also offer a writing workshop. He'll discuss finding compelling news stories, ensuring accuracy, as well as how to tell stories effectively. This free workshop is for University of Leicester students only. It will be perfect for Journalism, Media, English and Creative Writing students. Numbers are limited, so please sign up in advance. Please email Harry Whitehead to book a spot: hdw5@le.ac.uk. This workshop is convened by Tor Clark and Harry Whitehead for Literary Leicester.  

Gavin Esler in Conversation: Literary Leicester event 

Wed 20 Nov 2024, 6.30-7.30pm in Sir Bob Burgess Building Lecture Theatre 2

Gavin Esler, one of the country’s leading journalists, broadcasters and authors, was BBC Newsnight’s chief presenter from 2003 to 2014. He is the bestselling author of several works on the state of Britain as well as five novels. In this conversation, reading and Q&A, Gavin will discuss his most recent work, Britain Is Better Than This: Why a Great Country is Failing Us. Expect off-the-cuff wisdom, humour at the absurdities of what passes for our constitution, and more. You can book tickets for this free Literary Leicester event here.

Cathi Rae: "Poems of Other People's Lives": Poetry Reading

Tuesday 3 December 2024, 12-1pm, room TBC

This guest lecture and poetry reading is part of the undergraduate module Introduction to Writing Creatively 1. All are welcome to attend. 

Amirah Mohiddin: "Speculative Fiction: Writing YA Fantasy for Traditional Publishing"

Tuesday 3 December 2024, 4-5pm in room Fielding Johnson L66

This guest lecture is part of the undergraduate module Using Stories. All are welcome, but places are limited. If you'd like to attend, please email jt265@le.ac.uk in advance. 

Kit de Waal: "Research Tips for Writers": Masterclass

Wednesday 4 December, 2-4pm in room Attenborough 104

This masterclass is part of the MA module Research Methods in Creative Writing. All are welcome, but places are limited. If you'd like to attend, please email jt265@le.ac.uk in advance. 

Creative Writing Student Showcase 2024: The Recording

 

As many of you will know, during this year's amazing Literary Leicester Festival, we ran our third annual Creative Writing Student Showcase on the evening of Wednesday 20 March 2024. It was a wonderful event, featuring brilliant readings from BA, MA, PhD Creative Writing students and graduates, including Beth Gaylard, Grace Klemperer, Hannah Mitchell, Lisa Williams, Kathy Hoyle, Jack Peachey, Laurie Cusack, Daneil Hibberd, Tracey Foster, Rob Reeves, Isobel Copley, Alexander Osani, Oleksandra Korshunova and Laura Besley. Thank you to everyone involved: the speakers, the organisers and the fantastically supportive audience. 

You can now listen to a recording of the Creative Writing Student Showcase event on Literary Leicester's podcast channel here. 

Public Events and Guest Lectures, Autumn 2023

Here is a list of all the fantastic public events, workshops and guest talks hosted by the Centre for New Writing this Autumn. All of the events are free to attend, but you may need to sign up for some of them advance, since places are limited (see details below). Thank you, and we do hope you'll enjoy our programme of events.

Sunday 12 November, 7pm, online
New Walk Editions Launch: Derron Sandy and Blake Morrison
This is the online launch of two new New Walk Editions pamphlets: Blake Morrison, Never the Right Time, and Derron Sandy, The Chaos. New Walk Editions is co-edited by University of Leicester's Nick Everett. You can register for this free event here.

Tuesday 21 November, 730pm, Emerald Centre, 450 Gypsy Lane, Leicester

Triple Book Launch: "The Mad Road, Scablands and Encounters with Everyday Madness."
This evening will consist of readings by three authors launching their new short story collections: University of Leicester PhD Creative Writing graduate Laurie Cusack, Birmingham-based author Charlie Hill, and lecturer in Creative Writing, Jonathan Taylor. The event is free and all are welcome. No need to register in advance - just turn up on the day!

Thursday 23 November, 3pm, St Nicholas Place, Leicester. 
Tour of BBC Radio Leicester

This tour is part of the undergraduate module Writing Voices, but there are a few places open to other students. If you'd like to come along, please book a place by emailing jt265@le.ac.uk in advance. Numbers are strictly limited. 

Monday 4 December, 10am-12, Attenborough room 202
Masterclass with Kit de Waal: "Cultural Appropriation and Creative Writing" 

This Creative Writing workshop is part of the MA in Creative Writing. There are also limited places available for other students, staff and public. If you'd like to attend, please book a place by emailing jt265@le.ac.uk in advance. 

Tuesday 5 December, 11am-12, Attenborough room 206

Guest Reading and Q&A by Poet Kate Bingham
This lecture is part of the undergraduate module Introduction to Writing Creatively 1. There are limited places available for other students, staff and public. If you'd like to attend, please book a place by emailing ngre1@le.ac.uk in advance. The event is supported by Literary Leicester. 

Monday 11 December, 2-3pm, Attenborough room 205 PLEASE NOTE THE NEW DATE FOR THIS RESCHEDULED GUEST LECTURE
Guest lecture by Paul Taylor-McCartney: "Imagine If You Can: Thoughts on Writing Dystopian Fiction." 
This lecture is part of the undergraduate module Using Stories. There are limited places available for other students, staff and public. If you'd like to attend, please book a place by emailing jt265@le.ac.uk in advance. 

Wednesday 13 December, 2-4pm, Attenborough room 104
Masterclass with Amirah Mohiddin: "An Exercise in World Building: A Thousand and One Nights Meets 1950s Morocco in a YA Fantasy." 
This workshop is part of the MA in Creative Writing. There are limited places available for other students, staff and public. If you'd like to attend, please book a place by emailing jt265@le.ac.uk in advance. The event is supported by Literary Leicester. 

End of Spring Term News

It's the end of the Spring term, so we thought we'd share some recent news from Creative Writing at Leicester. Wishing everyone a good Easter break!

Firstly, we'd like to welcome bestselling author Adele Parks, who has joined the School of Arts as Visiting Professor. She gave a guest workshop on Wednesday 15 March. We've also recently had brilliant guest talks and workshops by Barbara Cooke, Farhana Shaikh and Amirah Mohiddin. There are some great forthcoming guest events next term too. You can see a complete list here.  

New Walk Editions, co-edited from the Centre for New Writing by Nick Everett, is publishing its first full-length poetry collection, Alan Jenkins’s The Ghost Net, on 8 May. The launch event, with readings by Jenkins and by Adrian Buckner and Tuesday Shannon, will take place at Five Leaves Bookshop in Nottingham at 7pm on Wednesday 24 May.  For more details of the book and the event, please see here.

Congratulations to all students and graduates who performed at the Creative Writing Student Showcase on Monday 27 March, which was part of the wonderful Literary Leicester Festival 2023: Laurie Cusack, Kathy Hoyle, Laura Besley, Nina Walker, Sara Waheed and Karen Powell-Curtis. Thanks to everyone who came to the event and helped make it such a lovely evening. 

Congratulations to PhD student Joe Bedford and MA Creative Writing student Laura Besley, both of whom have been longlisted for the Welkin Writing Prize!

As followers of this blog will know, Joe Bedford also has a debut novel, A Bad Decade for Good People, forthcoming from Parthian Books in June. You can read more about it here. His story "Peak Jack" has been published by Flights Journal here. 

MA Creative Writing student Madeleine Bell has written a review of Mona Awad's novel Bunny for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

As well as being longlisted for the Welkin Prize, Laura Besley's story "Vernacular" has been published by 50-Word Stories here. She has written reviews for Everybody's Reviewing here and here and here. 

MA Creative Writing student Sushma Bragg has written a review of Lionel Shriver's novel We Need to Talk about Kevin for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Laurie Cusack is publishing the book of short stories he wrote during his PhD in Creative Writing. The book is called The Mad Road, and will be published by Roman Books in August 2023. More details to follow! Laurie has also written a review for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Congratulations to BA English and Creative Writing graduate Shae Davies, whose stories "The Trung Sisters" and "Maria Ressa" have been published in Bedtime Stories: Amazing Asian Tales from the Past (Scholastic, 2022). 

Sam Dawson, MA Creative Writing graduate, has had his short story "Symphony no.14" published by Syncopation Literary Journal here. 

Congratulations to PhD Creative Writing student Kathy Hoyle, whose work was longlisted for the Bath Award for Novella-in-Flash. 

PhD student Lucretia McCarthy is editing a chapbook of life writing called Lives in Conversation. You can find the submission details here. Lucretia hosted and interviewed the experimental life writing author Joanna Walsh during this year's Literary Leicester Festival. 

BA English student Helen Schofield has written a review of Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Congratulations to Jane Simmons, PhD Creative Writing student, who has been longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. She also read a poem called "Poem in Which My Father Does Not Die Young" at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in November. The poem was longlisted in the Mslexia poetry competition. She has accepted an invitation to Mimi Khalvati’s poetry retreat on Crete in June. She wrote a review for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Lisa Williams, MA Creative Writing graduate, has had her flash story "The Weekly Shop" published in Friday Flash Fiction here. She also wrote a review for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

MA Creative Writing student Gift Yusuf has written a review of Purple Hibiscus for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Nina Walker, "Blooming"

Nina Walker is a third-year student and Leicester University. She enjoys writing, rug making and Ray Bradbury’s short stories. She’s been writing poetry since she was sixteen when the only person reading it was her mum. The dream is to be published eventually. 

Nina performed the following poem at the Creative Writing Student Showcase at Literary Leicester in March, 2022. 

About the poem 'Blooming,' by Nina Walker

The following poem was inspired in part by my paternal grandmother Wendy Walker, who worked in the hosier industry that was huge in the Midlands, as well as an article I read about the disgustingly long waiting list for people in this country needing cancer treatment. Since my grandma died of cancer during 2020 the two seemed thematically close. I wanted to try and get across the sense of loss I feel when I think about my grandma and the industry she used to work in. 'Blooming' is part of a larger collection I hope to publish about England’s past and how it affects our understanding of the present, as well as how we can come to love such a deeply troubled country.

Blooming

The alley behind Debenhams sells discount granny bras 
And I want to cut off my hair
Watch the threads slip down the drain
One by one

I keep reading about our collapse
Makes me sick, stomach full of all this bile
So I eat cleaner
Greener

But I still feel rotten, soft like a pear gone brown in the middle
Soft like the skin round a lump
Growing plump
In the glands in my chest
An anxious spasm

The city is not our friend
Doesn’t recall our names like a bad teacher
Fumbles with our futures like a bleeding pen
Blubbering like the lady behind Debenhams 
Or on the market 
With her cheap elastic bloomers 
When I’ve lost my job and my hair
I hope she’s the only millionaire 

Something about these people with their day jobs and money makes me feel faker than tan.
I can’t carve away at the pain we’re all stuck to like plump blue bottles
Can’t make work mean more than pennies counted
Can’t remove the tumours

We work till our fingers can’t pick out the stitching anymore 

Till they’ve worn us out like Primark trainers 

My grandma worked with her hands 
Just like the woman did
But a tumour took my nan and a tumour is taking the woman too
But it's not in her body
So I can’t cut it out

The tumour is barren 
Stripped us of our tools 
Left us arthritic 
So we send our projects abroad to children with quick fingers 
Blank eyes

Your nan will live
Or not
They don’t really care if she makes a living 

Never mind the back alleys and soft flesh, it’s our conscience we should be searching.
If this country was a dog I’d shoot it out of mercy.

Creative Writing Student Showcase 2022

 

On Wednesday 23 March 2022, as part of Literary Leicester, we ran our first ever Creative Writing Student Showcase event in Attenborough Arts Centre, University of Leicester. The event was sold out, and featured fiction, poetry, prose and scripts from students across all our courses and programmes: BA, MA and PhD. The event was a wonderful opportunity to celebrate some of the brilliant work done by University of Leicester Creative Writing students, past and present, and was a great success. 

Students who performed at the event were: Joe Bedford, Laura Besley, Isobel Copley, Nina Walker, Lisa Williams, Tracey Foster (who read her recently-published poem "Second-Best Jewellery Box"), Laurie Cusack, Hannah Mitchell (who read her award-winning story, "Happy Birthday, Eileen"), Beth Gaylard and Cathi Rae.

Congratulations and thanks to everyone who was involved!

Guest Lectures, Masterclasses and Events, Spring 2022

There are lots of forthcoming Creative Writing events happening this term in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester. Here are some of them! They are all free and open to students, staff and the public. If you'd like to attend one of them, and aren't already registered, please email Jonathan Taylor, jt265[at]le[dot]ac[dot]uk for further details. 

Anita Sivakumaran: Guest Talk on Writing Fiction
Tuesday 1 March 2022, 2-3pm, Attenborough room 002

Anita Sivakumaran is the author of several books. Her first was a poetry collection titled Sips That Make a Poison Woman. Her novel The Queen fictionalised the life of a famous South Indian film star turned politician and was adapted into one of the most successful Indian television series of 2019. The Birth of Kali, a short story collection, followed, reimagining Hindu myths from a feminist perspective. Her latest novel, Cold Sun, published by Little Brown in 2021, is the first in the 'DI Patel' series, following a Leicester-born Scotland Yard detective. Cosmopolitan called it 'a super-gripping new thriller series ... will have you totally hooked.' The Times describes Anita as 'an exciting new name in crime fiction.' The second book in the series, set largely in Leicester, is due out this summer. Anita has Masters degrees from Bangalore and Lancaster Universities, and a PhD from the University of Leicester.

Kadija George: Guest Lecture on Decolonising Publishing through Independent Black Publishers

Monday 21 March 2022, 4-5pm, Ken Edwards room 527

Mainstream publishers are becoming more diverse in relation to their human resources and in the authors they publish. Do independent Black publishers still have a role in decolonising publishing? Dr. Kadija George Sesay is a scholar activist with a focus on radical publishing. She set up the Inscribe Writer’s Development Programme for Black British writers at Peepal Tree Press in 2004. Her role includes publishing a series of anthologies and chapbooks. She freelances for other publishers on book projects such as co-editing IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain with Courttia Newland. She is the founder of SABLE LitMag and an app, ‘AfriPoeTree.’ She recently co-authored This is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books with Professor Joan Anim-Addo and Dr. Deidre Osborne. She has edited several anthologies and received several awards for her work in the creative arts.

Literary Leicester Festival 2022

Wednesday 23 March 2022 to Saturday 26 March 2022

Free and open to all! You can see the full line-up for this year's events here. 

Leicester University Student Creative Writing Showcase

Wednesday 23 March, 430-545pm, Attenborough Arts Studio 1

Free and all welcome! As part of Literary Leicester Festival, we'll be holding a showcase event for University of Leicester BA, MA and PhD Creative Writing students to read and perform their poetry, stories and scripts. If you're a student and would like to get involved, please email Jonathan Taylor on jt265[at]le[dot]ac[dot]uk. 

Barbara Cooke: Guest Talk on Editing and Publishing 

PLEASE NOTE RESCHEDULED SLOT: Wednesday 30 March 2022, 10am-12, Attenborough room 111.

Please pre-book if you'd like to attend this session but aren't registered on the MA in Creative Writing. Places are limited. 

This session, which is part of the MA in Creative Writing but also open to others, will look at the day-to-day tasks and demands of entry-level editorial jobs. Barbara will also be looking back on how work experience in a publishing house can benefit your professional writing life, from understanding how production works to collaborating with an illustrator. Dr Barbara Cooke is a lecturer in English at Loughborough University and Co-Executive Editor of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. She began her career in 2007 as an Editorial Assistant in London, working on such challenging and groundbreaking titles as Xtra Naughty Cakes and Take the Kids to Paris. Later, she collaborated with illustrator Amy Dodd to produce the biography Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford.

Cathi Rae: A Masterclass on Performance Poetry

Wednesday 30 March 2022, 2-4pm, Attenborough room 204

Please pre-book if you'd like to attend this session but aren't registered on the MA in Creative Writing. Places are limited. 

Cathi Rae is a spoken word artist and performance poet, performing as headline poet throughout the UK. She is a multiple Slam Poetry Champion and is currently teaching a class on "How to become a spoken word poet" at the Attenborough Arts Centre. She has been described as " A spoken word icon" by no less a poet than Joelle Taylor. Her workshop, which is part of the MA in Creative Writing but is open to all, will cover:

• The nuts & bolts of the UK spoken word scene
• The reasons why a poet may want to develop a profile via spoken word poetry
• Discussion around some of the best talent currently working in the UK

There will also be practical work around performance and writing for performance. Participants will need to bring at least one poem that they feel might work as a spoken word piece.

Civil Service Fast Stream Q&A Session

Thursday 31 March 2022, 10-11am, online via MS-Teams

This one-hour session is an opportunity to learn about careers in the Civil Service. It will be hosted by Civil Service Fast Streamers, working across government. Please bring along any questions you have relating to the Fast Stream and wider Civil Service. The presenters will be happy to talk through any part of the application process, their experiences on the Fast Stream or anything else related. You can see more information about the Civil Service Fast Stream here. 

Jenny Kane: Perfecting Your Fiction Masterclass

Wednesday 11 May 2022, 10am-12, Attenborough room 210

Please pre-book if you'd like to attend this session but aren't registered on the MA in Creative Writing. Places are limited. 

Writing the draft of your first novel is just the beginning of the journey towards publication. To make sure that your novel reaches beyond a publisher or agents slush pile, you need to ask a number of questions of your work. Does this story work on a sentence-by-sentence level? Is it written in the best possible order? Am I drowning in exposition? Jenny addresses these questions and more in her two-hour masterclass, dedicated to elevating your editing process to the next level. This masterclass is part of the MA in Creative Writing, but there are also a limited number of places open to others. Over the past 17 years, Jenny has written 36 novels under the pen names Jenny Kane (romcoms), Jennifer Ash (medieval crime), and Kay Jaybee (erotica). Sixteen of these novels have been bestsellers, including the Midsummer at Mill Grange, Autumn Leaves at Mill Grange, Spring Blossoms at Mill Grange and Winter Fires at Mill Grange series, A Cornish Escape and Another Cup of Coffee (written as Jenny Kane), The Folville Chronicle series, (written as Jennifer Ash), The Perfect Submissive series, (written as Kay Jaybee). Jenny is currently working with two publishers, Headline and Head of Zeus, as well as the audio company Spiteful Puppet, for whom she writes audio scripts for ITV’s popular 1980’s television show, Robin of Sherwood. As co-manager of Imagine, a creative writing tutoring business operating across the South West of England, Jenny has helped launch many new novelists’ careers. You can learn more about Jenny here and here.

Val McDermid: 10th Annual Creative Writing Lecture: Killing People for Fun and Profit

Thursday 12 May 2022, 6.15pm, Peter Williams Lecture Theatre

Val McDermid, photograph by KT Bruce

Please pre-book tickets for this guest lecture here.

Dubbed the Queen of Crime, Val McDermid has sold over 15 million books to date and is translated into over 40 languages. She is perhaps best-known for her Wire in the Blood series, featuring clinical psychologist Dr Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan, which was adapted for television starring Robson Green. Her most recent novel Out of Bounds was a number one bestseller and her brand new novel Insidious Intent was published in August. As well as producing a bestselling novel every year, Val is a regular on TV, radio and in print. Her recent projects include two BBC Radio 4 dramas, chairing the Wellcome Book Prize and captaining the 2016 winning University Challenge alumnae team! Her awards, too numerous to list, include the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award, the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year, the Grand Prix des Romans D’Aventure, the Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award and the LA Times Book of the Year Award, as well as Celebrity Mastermind champion. She is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and The Royal Society of Edinburgh. Val will be discussing her writing, her inspirations and the fatal attraction of crime fiction! 

Amitav Ghosh with Clare Anderson, Mark Williams and Caroline Upton: The Climate Emergency: Creating A Dialogue Between Science And The Arts  

Tuesday 7 June 7, 2022, 6:00pm-7.30pm, Online Event. 

Please pre-book tickets for this online event here. 

It's 2022 and everybody is talking about the climate emergency, but what does it mean in a global context with plural perspectives? Join Amitav Ghosh, author of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) and The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2022), and a panel of experts chaired by Clare Anderson as we engage in dialogue between the sciences and the arts in thinking about the climate emergency.

Sci-fi Shorts Competition

By Jonathan Taylor

Over the last few months, the Centre for New Writing, Literary Leicester Festival and the National Space Centre have together been running a Creative Writing competition called "Sci-Fi Shorts." Entrants were invited to write science-fiction short stories on a space theme. There were two categories, one for writers 15 and under, one for writers 16+. 

The winners have now been announced, and the awards ceremony took place at the Space Centre as part of Literary Leicester Festival on Saturday, along with talks by eminent science-fiction authors Philip Reeve and Alastair Reynolds. 

The judging panel included representatives from the National Space Centre and the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester. I was one of them. The competition was hugely enjoyable to judge, and there were many strong entries to choose from - despite the difficulty of the challenge. As someone whose first published stories were science fiction, I often think science fiction is one of the hardest of all genres to write in. You have to juggle so many different elements in a successful science fiction story: stylish writing, characterisation, convincing scientific details, so-called "world building," and the demands of narrative - of telling a good story.  I moved away from writing science fiction many years ago - though I've always thought I might eventually return to it, and I still read widely in the form - to write in a more "realist" (or magical-realist) vein. I can't help feeling that realism is easier in some ways: you don't have to manage the science in the same way, and your world is ready-built for you. To manage these things whilst telling a good and emotional story is the great challenge of science fiction; and the winning entries for this competition did so brilliantly, almost effortlessly, in ways I very much admire.

You can read the prize-winning entries via the links below:

Age 16+:
Winner: 'In Gagarin’s Time' by Laura Ward
Runner-up: 'Bunker Mentality' by Paul Starkey 

Age 15 and below:
Winner: 'In Armstrong’s Footsteps' by Ashley Tan Mei-Lynn 
Runner-up: 'Lost In Space' by Giles Carey

Honourable Mentions:
‘What is it, Leavine?’ by Adair Cole 

‘Space Debris’ by Andrew Doubt 

Some of the winners with Philip Reeve at the Space Centre

A Masterclass from Bali Rai, by Rosalind Adam

The MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester joined together with Literary Leicester today to bring us an inspiring masterclass presented by Bali Rai.

Bali Rai was born in Leicester. He grew up in a multi-cultural, multiracial community, an experience that has had a definite influence on his writing. His first book was the best selling (Un)Arranged Marriage and he went on to become one of the UK's most successful YA authors. Today we were given a glimpse into his writing world, a chance to see how he has become so successful in his craft.

Bali Rai's enthusiasm was infectious.

"All humans are nosey parkers," he told us. We must make sure that our audience wants to know more. We must elicit in them first sympathy and then empathy for our characters. Throughout the afternoon he kept bringing us back to this point, to considering who our audience is when we are writing. How we can connect with the audience became his mantra.

He stressed how important it is to analyse each section, each paragraph. Every sentence needs to be there for a reason. If it doesn't have a reason then get rid of it and make sure all the content will connect with the audience. 

How well do we know our characters? He asks his characters questions about their habits, desires, emotions. Only when he knows the characters really well can he portray them in a three-dimensional way. Only then will they connect with the audience.

He dropped in many pieces of advice as he spoke, sharing lessons that he had learnt from experience. The beginning of a novel is the hardest and most important to get right. Character is more important than setting. If you find yourself staring at a blank screen then turn it off and take a break. And yes, as a writer he believes in ghosts. Why be rational? You're a creative writer! 

"Everything comes back to connection with the audience," he reminded us and he practiced what he preached. For this afternoon we were his audience and he certainly connected with us. We were with him all the way.


By Rosalind Adam, first published here.