Stories,Snakes and Cimate Change
When Tony Bradman put out a new brief in 2007 for stories about climate change Britain was poised for a storm surge down the North Sea which was threatening floods worse than the great floods half a century ago. On the 31st January 1953 a wall of water, driven by winds over 100mph, swept down the North Sea and over 300 people died. It was the worse peace time disaster in Britain in the twentieth

Get out of the attic!
I have been writing since I could read but when I was growing up no-one took much notice. My parents encouraged me to do well generally at school but school did not encourage my creativity and I was too shy to admit to anyone that I wrote. I did however write songs and sing them to my friends at uni and did the occasional open mic spot. It wasn't until I had my kids that creative writing classes

All writing is rewriting
Read over your compositions and when you meet a passage that you think particularly fine, strike it out. Samuel Johnson. I try to leave out the parts other people skip. Elmore Leonard. START AGAIN? Writing anything can involve such a huge effort that many people feel they can't face the redraft. And yet without the redraft, have we really written anything at all? Professional writers talk a

Throw nothing away.
I have kept notebooks most of my life and have a cupboard full of them. Reading back through a couple of notebooks recently I found two poems which I had forgotten about and I'm working on them with a fresh eye and inspiration.In the last three years my notebooks have been full of notes, thoughts, character studies, landscape descriptions, relating to my cycle of three novels set on Hayling

Whose head are we in?
In my workshops we often discuss creating and holding a point of view in fiction. Why is this important? David Lodge in 'The Art of Fiction', maintains that when the writer constantly shifts the point of view "the reader's involvement ..'production'of the meaning of the text, will be disturbed."Jumping around, in and out of many character's heads, makes it almost impossible for the reader to