From the archives: How will Virtual Reality reportage affect our experience of the news? What are the ethical issues involved?
Read MoreOn this day: Immersive journalism
News & views
Nonfiction Notebook: No excuse for poor spelling
Unless you’re so poor at spelling or English in general that a spell-checker wouldn’t do you much good anyway, there isn’t really any excuse for this sort of thing.
Read MoreCreative writing using constraints: a course
What is writing with constraints? In a nutshell, it means writing according to specific and tight rules. The “official” name for this is Oulipo, which is a French acronym for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle.
Read MoreOn this day: PhotoPrompt #30: Skies in the time of Covid
“One of the unexpected benefits of the Covid-19 pandemic has been clear blue skies.”
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Blogger, by Terry Freedman
Nonfiction Notebook: Is creative writing teachable?
Some people say "of course creative writing can be taught", while others say the opposite. I take a slightly more nuanced view.
Read MoreOn this day: Covid19: who ya gonna trust?
To the extent that people distrust journalists, is it really surprising?
Read MoreNonfiction Notebook: Authors and their rituals
Some research looked at writers’ rituals. Hearing about that made me reflect on my own.
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Substack blues
in News & views
I love Substack, but…
Read MoreOn this day: Second-hand ebooks?
in News & views
I love second-hand bookshops. Whenever I go on holiday, one of the first things I do is go to the nearest Tourism Information outlet and get a list of the local used bookshops.
So, what do I like about them, and what does this have to do with ebooks?
Competition to win a copy of Gay Talese's A Town Without Time
Last week I announced a competition to win a copy of A Town Without Time, the new collection of work by Gay Talese. Here is the link again, this time with an unrestricted link!
Read MoreMansplaining Jane Austen
in News & views
I was very pleased to be able to give a load of women the benefit of my wisdom and experience on a Jane Austen course a few months ago.
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Me feeling somewhat exercised
Playing the feminist card and blaming the 'patriarchy'
in News & views
Playing the feminist card strikes me as intellectually lazy.
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A writer, by Terry Freedman
My 60 Minute Writer course
Next week I’ll be teaching a course called The 60 Minute Writer. The title always makes me smile because it sounds like I teach people how to be a writer in an hour. It reminds me of a joke by, I think, Frank Carson…
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The 60 Minute Writer
in Events, News & views
My creative writing course
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Blogger, by Terry Freedman
Blogging is not dead!
in Events, News & views
There is still a great interest in writing blogs. One of the reasons I know this is that my course on blogging currently has twelve sign-ups. That may not sound a lot, but many courses at the City Lit have far fewer.
Read More20 autobiographies: excessive? On the contrary
So are elevator speeches completely useless? On the contrary, I think you need to develop several of them.
Read MoreNano reviews
You’ve heard of six-word stories. How about nano non-fiction?
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A blogger, by Terry Freedman
AI for bloggers
In my recent blogging course, I abandoned my carefully-prepared lesson, or part pf it, threw caution to the winds, and suggested to the class that we experiment with using AI for writing blog posts. Here’s a partial blog post it came up with, which you will agree is utter rubbish…
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My writing-related filing cabinets, by Terry Freedman
Creative writing using constraints: a bit of a post-mortem
I think evaluations are very odd devices to be honest. Someone once “marked me down” on her evaluation of a one day course I was running on the grounds that the traffic was terrible.
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Photo by Terry Freedman
Remuneration
This is an updated version of an article I published on this website in 2015. In my experience, it absolutely applies to artists, teachers and other creatives as well as writers or consultants.
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