This quotation from C.S. Lewis has been doing the rounds of both the writers’ and fountain pen communities. I quite like it – even if I find some of Lewis’s other output a bit too unbearably pompous for modern tastes. It appears on the back dust jacket of a recent collection edited by David C. …
Recently, I have been taking a deep dive into the surprisingly flourishing global subculture of fountain pens. I was introduced to fountain pens at school and in 1980 settled on a Targa by Sheaffer in Brushed Stainless Steel with a steel nib (model 1001) powered by Parker Quink black ink. I have been writing with …
I’ve found that recently I have been spending far too much time reading Twitter. As everyone knows the interfaces of various social media are deliberately designed to be addictive and the infinite scroll and chaotic ordering on Twitter was playing havoc with my researcher brain, trained over the years to find all the information and …
Reassuring findings for numerous academics – and other writers! Helen Sword (2016) ‘Write every day!’: a mantra dismantled, International Journal for Academic Development, 21:4, 312-322, DOI: 10.1080/1360144X.2016.1210153 Abstract Numerous books, blogs, and articles on research productivity exhort academics to ‘write every day’ even during the busiest of teaching times. Ironically, however, this research-boosting advice hangs …
David Beer provides some really useful quick tips on writing on his blog The Fragment. 19 very brief thoughts on writing. Not rules, guidance or advice, just some thoughts. I particularly like these tips: 9. If you aren’t enjoying the writing, change the writing plan to bring forward a project you will enjoy (or, alternatively, …
An interesting reflection by Rob Kitchen on the relationship between academic and fiction writing and storytelling on the Transforming Society blog. He says: The usual approach to writing an academic article or book is to produce a factual, discursive narrative that weaves together theories, observations and findings, contextualising the contentions made with respect to the …
I have just come across this fascinating journal which published its first issue in 2015. Shades of Jorge Luis Borges… You can read some interesting findings on the effects of lockdown in the May 2020 issue Journal of Imaginary Research A key aim of our journal/zine is to encourage academic colleagues to embrace writing simply …
Smith, Zadie. “Fascinated to presume: In defense of fiction.” The New York Review of Books 24 (2019). A really wonderful philosophical reflection by Zadie Smith on the reasons for writing and reading fiction and for an engagement with and inclusion of the diversity of human experience. A few extracts that I found particularly helpful. I …
While looking for resources for the creative writing course I am running this semester, I came across some fantastic sets of rules put together by a number of well-known authors at The Guardian‘s request. The lists are introduced as follows: “Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos …
This post was originally intended as a bare-bones response to Bruno Latour’s challenge to list hopes for change emerging out of the coronavirus crisis, but ended up being prefaced by a preamble on my difficulties with writing and a reflection on my current context. For quite some time, I have suffered (and I use the …
Refracted Input 