27 Sep How to write about place
Last week I ran two special workshops in the small coastal town of Laurieton on the mid-north coast of NSW. They were held in the old boat shed of the...
Blog
19 Sep What stops you writing?
Is it your heart – are you afraid of what you might find? Or your head? Does it think you don’t have time? 10 tips on how to stop the block If...
13 Sep What it takes to research a book
You never know what you’re going to do to research a book. For The Pagoda Tree I’ve shared my hotel room with a rat, ridden on a bullock cart, met...
05 Sep Meeting the Bookwallahs
Yesterday I met 4 writers – two Indian & two Australian – who were part of the 2012 Bookwallah tour, Asialink Arts’ roving international writers festival through India. This amazing...
29 Aug Why you always need a notebook
This week I’ve been out bush in the Northern Territory. Out in the heat (36 degrees), in the gritty red dirt, feeling the sun’s bristling rays. For 9 days I...
22 Aug How to hook your reader from the first line
Whether it’s an article or your first chapter, you need to make your first lines work hard. They must hook the reader, wind them in, convince them to read on. They...
16 Aug Longform stories in print & online
Last week I was at the Walkleys Storology conference in Sydney. This brought international and national journalists, publishers, editors, ‘journo-preneurs’ and other creatives together. I was on a panel discussing the...
08 Aug How to say more by saying less
Writing something short can be as hard or harder as working on a long sprawling project like a novel. But in the process of whittling down your words, you get...
01 Aug Give yourself permission to write rubbish
At my travel memoir course last weekend we were talking about how much writing is rewriting. How hard it can be. How rare it is that your first draft is...
25 Jul How to write about other cultures
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...