Watch out for James McCreet’s forthcoming special series on Advanced Creative Writing Techniques – coming soon!
Learning to write is a neverending process. It’s also a process that occurs in stages and which accrues throughout our lives. We learn the rudiments at school. Then we read more widely and learn new techniques. University may add a new set of skills, then professional writing might add more. When we start to write fiction, we bring all the strata of our accumulated writing experience to the page – and that’s usually a bad thing.
We need to think of our writing ability in archaeological terms. Like an ancient city, our experience is a combination of (supposedly) solid foundations, strong defensive walls, battlements and turrets – but also a lot of rubble filler, clogged drains and rubbish tips. We bring all of this to our work: the good and the bad.
The trick is to
