https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inspiration-versus-perspiration/id1674424465?i=1000655619334
In this episode of the Writers’ Gym Podcast with Dr Rachel Knightley and Emily Inkpen we’re looking at inspiration and perspiration and whether one or other of them is the predominant force in the lives of our presenters. As usual we have advice, anecdotes, ideas and a writing challenge that listeners can participate in.
In this edition of the Writers’ Gym podcast we are joined by the award-winning novelist Gareth L Powell to talk about his work across several genres. Known primarily as a science-fiction author, Gareth has also written thrillers and fantasy. His guide for writers “About Writing : A Field Guide for Aspiring Authors” (Gollancz 2022) was described as “Brilliant” by The Guardian. In this conversation with Rachel Knightley and Emily Inkpen we discuss Gareth’s career and hear his advice for writers wishing to focus on a single genre or expand their writing into new genres.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/music-and-writing/id1674424465?i=1000654123393
In this edition of the Writers’ Gym Podcast with Rachel Knightley and Emily Inkpen we’ll look at the relationship between music and writing. We’ll explore music as inspiration and motivation, music as a creator of moods and as an accompaniment to your work and books inspired by or suggested by music.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/character-building/id1674424465?i=1000653404700
In this episode of the podcast we’ll be looking at the art of generating characters for your fiction. We’ll look at the secrets of creating believable and authentic characters that can drive your story forward. Emily and Rachel will talk about their own characters, the inspiration behind them and the ways in which they have shaped events in their fiction.
Saying any piece of writing ‘transcends its genre’ is an efficient way to grit the teeth of any genre writer. However, from the perspective of a genre writer who happens to be learning transcendental meditation (hello), transcending stops being about moving above or beyond. It becomes a journey in (and, simultaneously, out). As a result, I’m giving myself permission to think exactly that about ‘A Crash Course in Black Holes’, Aliya Whiteley’s essay in Writing the Future edited by Writers’ Gym series one guest Dan Coxon. I loved this deeply thoughtful, friendly conversation with and love-letter to the writing process. It speaks not only to the direct subject matter of science fiction writing and being a science fiction writer but of the relationship between research and writing – no matter what our subject, or our idea of what research means for us.
“Am I writing a novel? Or am I, in fact, watching Bargain Hunt?” Novelist Katharine Orton’s (artist formerly known as) Twitter page, c. 2021
As much as we might doubt ourselves as we stare out of the window, at/through the TV or computer screen, research can be everything, even and especially when it’s not relevant to the current project: “Life is research,” Aliya reminds us. “Just being alive is research. This includes… eating, drinking and sleeping, and watching television, and sitting at the bottom of the shower in a bad mood. It’s probably not relevant for the thing you’re writing now… Let’s call it inadvertent, long-distance, secondary research.” It can be just as much of an environment for self-doubt when it’s more obviously research, too. When does period research become procrastination? When does reading what everyone else has said about what you want to talk about become a distorting mirror for our own view of the worthiness or sanity of what we are trying to create ourselves?
Research is part of most of our processes, which is what makes authorial google histories so worrying and apt for hilarity/misconstruction. This week I’ve asked a GP about how best to arrange an accidental death for a character (N.B. I did NOT use an NHS appointment for this: the GP in question is my cousin). More horrifically still, I heard myself commenting on how marvellously convenient her answer was.
Katharine’s tweet and Aliya’s essay both offered me reassurance around the most important thing for a creative writer to know: that self-esteem, or lack of it, is the main ingredient; the key thing we bring to the blank page. Which is absolutely fine, as long as we acknowledge this and its intrinsic dangers, that research (particularly interesting, enjoyable research which all research is fairly likely to become when we’re working on subjects we are drawn to) is fuel and not destination, that it’s only as useful if we keep coming back from it to pour into the next blank page.
“At some point the idea and the information will come together to the moment where writing can start. Recognising that point, and acting upon it, is difficult. But I always feel better once I sop procrastinating and get on with it.” – Aliya Whiteley
Not waiting for our feelings or the doubts to resolve, but providing our feelings with evidence of facts in the world, is the way through this: showing-not-telling ourselves that whatever undermines our confidence does not, in fact, have more reality than what we put into the world does. There is nothing more real than coming back to the blank page and daring to fill it. Hence, as Aliya says, “Finishing that story, whether it’s good or bad, publishable or awful, is its own form of research for the next story.” And, while all research is absolutely fuel, we’re the ones who channel it into a unique journey:
“All research is subjective… If we all read the same sources at the same time… we’d come away with various pieces of information that have resonated, connected, affected us differently. I think maybe that’s where inspiration lives.” – Aliya Whiteley
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/beating-the-blank-page/id1674424465?i=1000652682615
In this episode of the Writers’ Gym Podcast we will be thinking about starting to write. Writing the opening page of your story needn’t be a battle against that glaring white first page and all the psychological demons it implies. Rachel and Emily offer tips, advice and hacks for starting to write and share examples and anecdotes from their own writing lives.
Today in Brainz Magazine I’m conducting a very special interview with a prolific figure in all our writing lives, based on a question from a Writers’ Gym member: ‘How do you talk to the guilty feeling when it feels like you haven’t done enough?’. You can read the full article here.
This is a voice many of us listen to every day. But are we hearing what it’s saying, or something worse?
Let me know if you take up the writing (or life) challenge and book in your own interview with Writers’ Guilt. When you hear what they’re really saying, what surprises you?
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/write-what-you-know-a-discussion/id1674424465?i=1000651971002
In this edition of the Writers’ Gym Podcast with Dr Rachel Knightley and Emily Inkpen we take a look at one of the most common pieces of advice offered to writers: “Write what you know”. We examine this advice to consider what it means for our writing and consider how it works in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy as well as in general fiction.
and why it’s on us, not the ghosts we walk with, to decide who we are and who we can become.
One of the Wednesday Questions in the Writers’ Gym last week (a weekly ritual where writers ask anything on their minds about creativity, confidence, careers, work-in-progress or anything else about writing and life) came from a member who’s been thinking about what it means to be nourished, mentally and spiritually. They asked what’s worked for me, and for other members.
The question flashed me right back to school in the late Nineties, and to a stock phrase (polite, more specific term for ‘cliché’) we heard a lot from a member of staff I respected enormously:
“I Want Don’t Get”
What’s that got to do with nourishment, mental, spiritual or otherwise?
It’s the simplest recipe for how to not get it.
For me, this quote is inseparable from who I heard say it: someone who taught me a huge amount about things I grew to love, and encouraged me in them, but who also (long after I’d been at school) shared with me that when, as an adult, they told their own parent (who’d said that stock phrase to them throughout childhood and beyond) that they wished they’d carried on in higher education was shocked to hear ‘Then why didn’t you say so?’
The truths we internalise and spend years if not lifetimes daring ourselves into quiet rebellions against, we can – sometimes – eventually – discover were never intended to be taken that way in the first place.
Which means it’s on us, and not on the ghosts we walk with, to decide what we believe and who we can become.
Wherever we dare sense a discomfort, a swallowed truth we’re just realising is there, there’s a ‘should’ fairy flapping around somewhere at the other end of it. In this case, perhaps, ‘we shouldn’t be greedy’, and/or ‘it’s greedy to want’. Or, indeed, in society as many of us have experienced it directly or historically, ‘women’s primary purpose is the nurture of others’. Keep doing that without acknowledging the should fairies flapping around, and we might end up with very successful, obedient caeers and personal lives but something will have been left behind. Some nourishment to the soul and mind that is not necessarily better than the other choices, but didn’t necessarily have to be neglected in order to follow them either.
Our creative side makes us fully who we are. It’s the beginning of a benign circle. When we nourish it, it nourishes others.
The courage to look in the emotional mirror is much more nurturing than it is scary: the more of ourselves available to us, the more authentically we can be available to others in turn. Answering ‘what do I want?’ is hard. To do it well often goes against years of conditioning. But the answers are there.
For me, nourishment in all aspects of life come easier and more freely when I’m taking regular check-ins with:
A) What I want
and
B) What I fear.
The things we want, the deeper we want them, can get covered by attacks from the ‘Should’ Fairies: I shouldn’t want that, that shouldn’t be a priority, things like that aren’t for people like me etc.
Here are three ways to check in with what you want spiritually, mentally, socially, physically…whatever is relevant to you, at any given time.
Candle time
I’ve talked about the candle recently so won’t go back over that now but one development since then is that candle time can happen without the candle. If the light isn’t right, or I don’t have enough time before the next event for it to burn to reach the sides, I look at the unlit candle before I start journaling and it does exactly the same job as if it were lit. I journal, which includes a to-do list and a reigniting of the whys behind the whats. It sets me up for the day by reconnecting me with who I am.
Monthly ‘I want’s‘
In that same journal, I check in with the things I’ve caught myself missing or wanting, and I start to look at the ‘I fear’ that is behind every neglected ‘I want’. This month’s include travel (something unpleasant happened to me when I first travelled alone and I’m still having symptoms around that). Having expressed to myself it was something I wanted to tackle, a conversation with an old friend sparked an agreement to do a trip together. That wouldn’tt have happened without the ground work of what nourishes me: what I want – and what’s stopping me (what I fear).
‘If I wave my magic wand… what is the connection I want to reach out for?’
Looking myself in the mirror (emotionally rather than literally) and telling myself on the page or aloud what I want allows me to spot how what I fear (the ways it might not work, perceived failure by myself or others, perceived rejection in whatever form that would take, perceived personality for wanting it in the first place).
It might be checking in with a person already in your life who’s been on your mind, it might be more community, either existing or branching out from the networks you already have. It might be learning something new, or trying something you previously thought you weren’t (here comes one of the greatest self-poisoning phrases) “the sort of person who” liked or did or spent time on that.
Once we’ve done this groundwork, we put the boundaries around our own time and channel our what-ifs into creativity instead of anxiety – how do I want to make this my reality? – the reaching-out in the world we need to get and keep that nourishment.
The next step is making it a habit…coming back to ourselves, checking in again. Because the small answers may change week to week but the big answers beneath them get clearer every single time.
Grab a workout at the Writers’ Gym here or find out more on the website.
Catch the latest episode of The Writers’ Gym podcast landing today on Apple, Spotify or any of your favourite platforms.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/unreliable-narrators/id1674424465?i=1000651257190
In this episode Rachel and Emily look at unreliable narrators and how to create and use them in your writing. With examples from literature we look at the ways in which unreliable narrators can give your stories depth, authenticity and a plot-twist or two to keep your readers guessing.