Do you always fall into the same writing habits? The same tone, the same phrases? You’re in good company. At my lovely Creative Writing class yesterday I was explaining how writers have tics – not facial ones, although perhaps we have them too – the ones...
Good grammar is the bricks and mortar of writing. If you want to communicate clearly in an email, a report, an article or a full-length book, it’s important to get your grammar right. Some writers I know rely on the squiggly green lines in Microsoft Word...
This month I started teaching Creative Writing at the Australian Writers’ Centre. The premise of the course is ‘There’s no right way to write.’ Of course, there isn’t. Anyone who tells you to do it their way is misguided. Nor is there any right way to plan...
No-one likes rejection. But every writer faces it. Martin Green from Pantera Press recently wrote, ‘Virtually every best-selling author was rejected by every publisher they contacted except the one where they found their eventual home.’ I thought those words were worth repeating. Except in the rare...
In a recent video interview with the Australian Writers’ Centre I was asked how I write about other cultures. The pitfalls, the pleasures. And how writing about my Indian characters in The Pagoda Tree differed from writing about Ani, the Tibetan nun, in Last Seen...
To make the publisher’s deadline for my new novel, I’ve been through an intense period of editing. At times it felt like running a marathon – except the finish line kept getting further away. At the end, when I should have had my feet up, I...