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What is a typical day for a journalist?
The typical day for a journalist always varies depending on what your working circumstances are. But here are some ideas.
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It’s one day to NaNoWriMo people. Now that I have freaked you out, do you need some help planning for it?
Thinking of doing NaNoWriMo this year? Did you only just realise that it was one week away? Don't worry, I have something that can help you plan for it.
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Interviewing techniques from the BBC
The BBC has an arm called the BBC Academy. In this video Peter Allen discusses interviewing techniques for journalists to use.
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Watch “The true story of ‘true’ – Gina Cooke” on YouTube
This is a fantastic piece on etymology and the fascinating ways in which we have thought about ourselves and ideas and how we can trace all that by following the history of a word. Word nerds, geek out.
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Slowing down time (in writing and in film) by Aaron Sitze
Pacing is always important in any sort of storytelling. Too fast and your readers will miss something, too slow and they will fall asleep. But it is also about how and when to introduce suspense and when to keep things moving along quite steadily rather than making readers slog their way through. Here in this TED-Ed video, Aaron Sitze has some pointers on pacing. If you struggle with pacing, let me know in the comments.
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The writing plan for June
It’s June today. A June day, today, let’s say since June began the day before yesterday. On this June day my TBR is neither pile nor stack, it is a scatter instead, in bags, on shelves, across the floor, under laptops and beds. It’s also not To Be Read but rather like quantum, a mix between the two, some To Be Read but some also read already so To Be Reviewed. I need a plan.
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How to write descriptively by Nalo Hopkinson
In Sedition there is an ever present gecko that consistently turns up. I have no idea why it does when the actual leit motif, if any, is a plant mentioned throughout the book. But description is important in writing and here Nalo Hopkinson points out why doing it well matters: Do you have any issues with description in your writing? Leave a comment below if you do and let me know that I am not the only one! 🙂
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Watch “How to make your writing funnier – Cheri Steinkeller” and then let me know what you think.
I once spent an entire year while in high school writing what was my first attempt at a novel. It was very episodic and almost sit-com like because it was a) cheesy and b) I was working out how to write humour into scenes, from wit to slapstick. These days there are still a lot of things I have to learn about writing such as figuring out the best way to convey something I want to say when I see it in the way a character moves physically in my head and to turn that into words on a page that conjure up the same image. I think visually –…
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The Gap by Ira Glass
For those moments when you despair that what you are creating isn’t as good as you hoped it would be: Video by David Shiyang Liu, found via a group on FB, thank you my darlings.
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My story on China’s circuit breaker mechanism
I recently got back from two months in Sri Lanka where I worked as a weird mix of intern and reporter and production assistant and researcher for both a TV channel called Newsfirst and a radio channel called Yes FM. They allowed me to take some of the work I had done for my portfolio when I left. So here is some of the work I did. This is the story on the circuit breaker mechanism that China trialled in early January. It was part of why the global economy in January was so shaky that oil prices got affected a lot more than they otherwise might have been. I…
