Pinkbelt

Yay! Such a beautiful and chilling story…. well done!!

Congratulations, Elle! A really poignant story!

My flash “Little Bird” has been published in Reflex Fiction today https://www.reflexfiction.com/little-bird-flash-fiction-by-laure-van-rensburg/

Glad it is useful.

The workshop was great and organised by Word Factory. I highly recommend them if you’re in London.

After the workshop, some of us stayed behind to discuss what we learned and then after that they have a short story club where everybody read a designated story beforehand and then we spent an hour discussing it. The story this…[Read more]

Well done, Daeds. Really impressive! I hope it leads to more programmes.

That sounds an interesting workshop, Elle.

I think that treating ‘place’ as a character in its own right can add an extra dimension to a piece of writing, so that’s a handy checklist to follow. Thanks for sharing.

Good to know! Coffman starters are great. Basically using a shotgun cartridge to start an engine, minus the lead shot of course. I don’t just do naval aviation btw, my last nonfic was a biography of a RAF bomber pilot, flying instructor and test pilot before and during WW2. Any technical queries, feel free to ask

Thanks Elle. These are good prompts. I’m very into settings, which I think comes from my previous life as a conservation ecologist – working in some amazing wild places. So I’ve always got to have a strong sense of the natural world that my story takes place in – weather, plants, animals, noises, tides, rock types … yeah maybe I go too far, but…[Read more]

Just seen this post…

I too am floundering about in the “half-idea” realms…. I think I usually need two sort of “touch points”: an inciting incident of some kind, but then another event of some kind to head towards in the narrative. At the moment, I sort of just have my inciting incident and not another “way point”. Grrr.

These days, I find…[Read more]

Very interesting blog, Elle. Place is very important to me when I write and when I read. It’s often the element of a novel that stays with me longest after I’ve finished it. I try to think in terms of how the people in my story react with the space within the scene and what part the place has played in their lives but your list is very helpful.