Educational articles
Literary Resources
Short, practical essays on the craft — free to read, share and use in your own writing groups.
Keeping a writer's notebook
A notebook is not a diary. It is a place for overheard sentences, the colour of a particular wall in Mdina at four o'clock, a name you might give a character, a question you cannot answer. Carry one, or use your phone, but write things down the moment you notice them. Noticing is the first skill; the notebook trains it.
Once a week, reread the last seven days of entries and underline anything that still has a pulse. Those underlined lines are your raw material.
Reading as a writer
When a passage moves you, stop and ask how. Is it the length of the sentences? A detail held back until the last moment? A shift in tense? Copy the paragraph out by hand — slowly — and you will feel its machinery in a way silent reading never reveals.
Giving feedback that helps
Begin with what the piece is trying to do, then describe where it succeeds and where you, as a reader, lost your way. Point to specific lines. Offer questions rather than rewrites. And remember the writer is not obliged to take your advice — only to hear it.
The second draft is a different job
Drafting is discovery; revising is decision. Before revising, write one sentence describing what the piece is about now — not what you meant it to be about. Then cut whatever does not serve that sentence, even if it is your favourite line.