• Writing Advice

    Wednesday Writing: Kill Your Darlings

    So last Saturday I went to a fortnightly coffeeshop critique session with the university creative writing society. It’s always a great time, ideas flying around, caffeine being inhaled, cakes everywhere, and after a while discussion turned to the idea of killing your darlings [or, as someone rather alarmingly put it ‘smothering your babies’]. If you haven’t heard the term before, it means editing or cutting a piece of your writing that you love, in order to improve the overall piece. It can include wonderful lines of description, certain scenes you love which don’t match with the pacing or people think are irrelevant, or sometimes even whole characters. It’s a thing…

  • Writing Advice

    Wednesday Writing: How to Give Good Feedback

    Hey everyone, I’ve been meaning to start doing a weekly post about creative writing. I know a lot of people who read also love to write [myself included] and I thought it would be helpful to talk about some things like feedback, passive versus active, what to do once you’ve written a book/story/poem and why things like adverbs drive me insane.   Today I’m going to talk about feedback. Most people who write have probably already experienced giving and receiving feedback, and if you haven’t, it’s one of those things you’re likely to come across. Feedback can be wonderfully helpful, and I can guarantee that every book on the shelf…