Dear Writer

This week we tried a writing exercise, titled the 'Stain Glass Poem'. This involved answering a number of questions and then reorganizing the answers into a poem of sorts. We did the exercise and talked about how it worked for us and how we think it helps to culture creativity. The exercise came from the article: Enhancing the group experience: Creative writing exercise by Kathie Wenz and J. Jeffries McWhirter (1990) in the Journal for Specialists in Group Work, 15:1, p37-42.

Last time in our long monthly episode we discussed writing beginnings. We followed that up in this month's main episode by talking about endings. We were surprised to find we did not agree on everything and had different viewpoints, but each of our opinions on endings contributed to making an interesting episode (and hopefully, interesting books!).

We had some interesting discussions about writing creating empathy in this talking shop episode. Sarah focussed on a scientific article which revealed some of the benefits of reading fiction, while Ashley presented an article about the differences between first and third person when it comes to evoking empathy in your readers.

On this author spotlight episode, we had Douglas W.T. Smith with us to talk about his recently published novella, Shadow of the Wicked, and his soon to be published novel, To Wield The Stars. Douglas has also had a variety of short stories published in magazines and was shortlisted in 2015 for a historical fiction award and in the same year for a science fiction award. We thoroughly enjoyed speaking with Douglas about his writing journey and the road so far.

Inspired by our last culturing creativity episode on games, we decided to focus on one game in particular and try it out to see how it works. The story cubes are a great writing prompt to encourage creative writing and to make connections between different concepts. Listen in to hear more of our experience.

This week for our main episode on Dear Writer, we explored beginnings. We focused on the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first chapter, the introduction of your protagonist, and even went as far to talk about how you might plan to write the first book of a series.

This week on our talking shop episode, Sarah discussed a book she read by John Cleese, titled "Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide". Ashley was interested in a paper about historical fiction after immersing herself in research for our book. She discusses the paper "A True Story: Defining Accuracy and Authenticity in Historical Fiction" written by Laura Saxton.

Today on our author spotlight we had Jonathan Reddoch and Elizabeth Suggs from Collective Tales Publishing. Jonathan and Elizabeth both have a passion for writing and are focused on writing and publishing speculative, horror and science fiction stories. Their first anthology, Collective Darkness, was the #1 Amazon bestseller for new horror anthologies. We talked to Elizabeth and Jonathan about their journey and what led them to enter the world of publishing.

On this Culturing Creativity episode, we geeked out over games and discussed how different games may enhance your creativity, and can sharpen skills that are useful in your writing. Who knew that playing games could have such great perks?

This week we had our promo episode for When the Rain Falls, our first novel which is due to release in October. Listen in to hear all about our characters and be the first to hear the book's blurb. We also recapped old times, which included reading terrible excerpts from the original version of the book we wrote fifteen years ago.