Day 1 A week at Varuna starts on a Monday afternoon. I arrive early so I can have lunch in Katoomba with author James Roy. In 2012 I did his excellent ‘Write a YA novel in A Year’ course at the NSW Writers’ Centre, and even though my one year YA novel is now a […]

Throughout his rich, creative life Richard James Allen has embodied many forms of artistry, from choreographer, performer, filmmaker and scholar, to acclaimed Australian poet, beginning his long list of publications and awards in the early 1980s. Nearly 40 years later his tenth book of poetry, Fixing the Broken Nightingale, from Flying Island Books, is a […]

Once sniffed at by literary critics, the short story has undergone a renaissance in recent years as reading patterns change and writers’ centres fill courses on the art of short-story writing. Technical aspects of short stories have been well examined, yet few writers have looked at how individual stories are written. Cracking The Spine goes […]

Reading Nora Krouk’s book, Warming the Core of Things, is akin to discovering a long-lost grandmother who invites you to sit by the fire and listen to her wondrous fairytales. The best bit, though, in Krouk’s case, is that these fairytales are all true and sound more like confessional journal entries than metaphorical narratives. This […]

  Bruce McCabe was born in 1969 and lived in Kenya, Fiji and Japan before returning to Australia, where he graduated in science from the University of Sydney. He worked for a variety of tech firms before making his name as an international expert on human factors in technology adoption and innovation. Along the way […]

In Tom Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Guildenstern declares that: ‘All your life you live so close to the truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque’. And so it is with the stories […]

Legendary film director Alfred Hitchcock is quoted as saying: ‘To make a great movie, you need just three things: a great script, a great script and a great script.’ I like that quote for two reasons: One, it acknowledges the importance of a good screenplay. And two, in a world filled with auteurs, any director […]

Words are the lifeblood of writing. Combining in myriad ways like the coloured pieces in a kaleidoscope, they can create wondrous effects – or muddy, lifeless, pompous prose that sends readers to sleep.So word choice needs to be a major focus for editors, whether editing their own work or that of others. Here are five […]

You have probably heard about blogging by now – it has been growing in Australia for some years. But if you haven’t quite worked out whether it is an activity that will suit you or not, that’s okay. Here are some tips that might help you decide: 1. Do it on your terms. Of course, […]