Tag: creative writing

Two essential events at this year’s Chester Lit Fest

A busy day at Chester’s Storyhouse, then.

It was the final full week of the Chester Literature Festival and I was running two events last week — a morning discussion [first two slides] and a lunchtime workshop [latter two slides].

The former was based around my book, Inside Fatherhood, and took the form of an audience-participation discussion about modern masculinity, fatherhood and male role models.

The latter was a writing workshop, serving as a taster for anyone trying to their idea into print, albeit fiction, journalism, blog or memoir.

Mark Chester, founder of the organisation Who Let The Dads Out, joined me.

He helped to lead the discussion and then bounce ideas in the workshop about more creative writing, while I focused on writing for magazines and websites.

Thanks to Mark and everyone who turned up on the day, including those we dragged up to join the discussion. We appreciate your support.

And we had some good feedback afterwards:

“I throughly enjoyed it and as usual, found some like-minded people to chat to. I’d enjoy any [future] event that makes me write something.”

So, here’s to the next one … watch this space.

#WriteHereWriteNow: How to write reviews

I was reading an interview with Danny Baker last week.

You may remember him as the man from those Eighties TV ads for Ariel, the hungover wingman to Chris Evan’s Britpop benders in the Nineties or the first one voted off last year’s I’m A Celebrity.

But, back in the summer of ’76, he was one of the Depford punk-rock gunslingers behind the legendary punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue. No, really.

And he had a motto for his early reviews of The Sex Pistols and The Clash, notes scribbled under a hail of spit and stale beer down the front of the moshpit.

“Sometimes right, sometimes wrong; always certain.”

Could we all learn from Baker’s juvenile chutzpah?

Here’s the issue: when it comes to writing reviews, it’s easy to be dull. Reviews are, essentially, a form of features in style yet it’s a format many even experienced writers struggle with.

Try this one, a review of the new Titanic hotel by the Belfast-born writer Glenn Paterson — a writer I admire.

Does it inform? Does it entertain?

Reviewers tread a fine line between information and entertainment. After all, most people reading reviews have no intention to ever buy the album/ see the film/ eat at the restaurant.

It’s a vicarious pleasure.

And the writers that tend to stand out are the ones with a distinctive voice, as well as in-depth knowledge of their specialist subject.

Think the late A.A. Gill of Sunday Times restaurant reviews fame, or Charles Spencer’s description of Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room as “pure theatrical Viagra” in a 1998 Daily Telegraph theatre review.

Gill died of cancer last year and, indeed the critics generally are dying off in the face of celebrity bloggers.

The media commentator Peter Preston laments this in today’s Observer. He writes:

“I think that, in small but important ways, critics help civilise journalism.”

This month at #WriteHereWriteNow we will consider the art of the critic.

Before the meeting on October 26, let’s try to write a 150-word review of something — a TV programme, a film, a new CD etc.

Can you channel a youthful Danny Baker to establish your voice?

Be right, or be wrong; be always be certain.

Liked this? Try also How to make the most of direct speech

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#WriteHereWriteNow: How to make the most of direct speech

We love direct speech.

As writers, nothing brings life to our work more the actual words people say.

Quotes, dialogue, comment — whatever you call it. We need the words of others to add emotion, opinion and drama.

Just try reading a book by the journalist and author Jon Ronson.

The man behind The Psychopath Test and others has made a career out of using direct speech to optimum effect.

But quotes mean handling interviews and therein lies the issue: sometimes interviews go wrong.

Try this clip, for example. Unluckily for the Channel Four News presenter Krishna Guru-Murthy, this car-crash celebrity interview has since gone down in history.

Next step forward Rhys Ifans. The Ruthin-born actor became legendary for all the wrong reasons a few years ago after a magazine interview turned into a study in interview hell.

Handling interviews is not easy and a skill only acquired through practise over time. That, and making mistakes.

We’ll be discussing how we use direct speech and how to get the best out of our interviewees at the next #WriteHereWriteNow meeting at Storyhouse, Chester.

Share your experiences and join the conversation before the next meeting by posting below.

Over to you …

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Punctuation: Why you’re all missing the point

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* Image via www.badlanguage.net

I’m becoming increasingly passionate about punctuation. No, really [deliberate use of comma].

I even spent ten minutes arguing about the placement of a full stop as part of a conference-call pitch to a tourist board recently. A comma, I insisted, just wouldn’t cut it. It had to be a full stop.

Maybe this grammatical grandstanding stems from years of marking undergraduate work in need of a good proofreader, or maybe it’s a grumpy-old-man reaction to the proliferation of typos creeping into articles online.

Either way, I find myself increasingly correcting semicolons, exterminating ellipses and battling with pedantic zeal my arch-nemesis: the exclamation mark.

So, when BBC 6Music presenter Gideon Coe announced a themed edition of his nightly show based around the concept of adventures in punctuation this week, I was tuning in before my old chief sub could sneer over my shoulder, “That should be an en dash.”

The show threw up a winning combination of great music and stylebook-testing punctuation pondering, such as the majesty of Nick Cave’s (Are You) The One I’ve been Waiting For? [brackets and a question mark] and the mysterious case of the missing question mark from The Smiths’ How Soon is Now.

It’s like the presenter said, announcing a track by the featured artist of the evening, Half Man Half Biscuit (Westward Ho! Massive Let-Down, since you ask):

“Punctuation is important.”

Well said, Gid. And, yes, the Devon village does come as a package with its symbiotic exclamation mark.

I’ll let that one go but, much as I love the music of Jenny Lewis, the gratuitous use of exclamation points (as our American cousins like to call them) in the title of the track Rise Up with Fists!! [see below] cannot be allowed to pass without a yellow card.

The listener-led discussion then turned to great punctuation abuses in rock, notably The REM album Lifes Rich Pagent.

The fourth studio album by the band, released in 1986 and featuring the track Fall on Me, is ominously missing an apostrophe to demonstrate the possessive.

It’s like David Marsh, another stickler for perfect punctuation and the man behind The Guardian‘s Mind Your Language blog, says:

“If only they had used an apostrophe, the meaning would have been clear.”

Of course this is nothing new.

Lynne Truss has been banging this particular discourse-inspired drum since the publication of her 2003 book Eats Shoots & Leaves.

I read it again recently and continue to admire her juxtaposition of scholarly research with deft, light touches of phrase.

But I fear Lynne and I could come to blows about those pesky exclamation marks.

Introduced by humanist printers in the 15th century, it was known as ‘the note of admiration’ until the 1800s and has been treated with caution by grammarians ever since.

Truss mounts a spirited defence of the exclamation mark and outlines a series of suitable uses, ranging from involuntary ejaculations (Phew! Lord love a duck!) to deflecting potential misunderstandings of irony (I don’t mean it!).

But, for me, the exclamation mark is the preserve of writers who simply try too hard. They don’t have the lexicon of language to make their point without honking like a deranged clown with a misfiring hooter.

It’s like Truss herself says:

“In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets over-excited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.”

Gideon Coe was far too fair-minded to boycott the exclamations during Punctuation Night. Indeed, Godspeed You! Black Emperor featured prominently in the evening’s dramatic coda.

But I think exclamation marks are – like Facebook – pure evil. Ban them, now!

What do you think about this post? Comment below.

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Gazetteer

BBC 6Music: Gideon Coe

Bad Language: WTF

David Marsh: if you can’t use an apostrophe, you don’t know your shit