Stories in Gold Dust magazine, Literally Stories, Close to the Bone, McStorytellers, Penny Shorts, Soft Cartel, Whatever Keeps the Lights On, Flashback Fiction, Cafelit, Best MicroFiction 2021, Writer’s Egg, Idle Ink, The Wild Word, Down in the Dirt, and Shooter magazine.
From the conceptual to the mechanical and back again. Merciless chrome and black, mercifully free of cabling, of Wi-Fi range, of needy battery icons.
It is writing with sound and fury, each key an inked thwack on a page stretched taut by paper fingers, writing with echoes of thunderous roars of keystrokes within typing pools, of industry caught halfway between manual and digital.
Continue reading “Writing with Grace Notes | Creative Non-Fiction”
After a long dalliance with the idea, I recently bought myself an antique typewriter on Ebay – a 1935 Remington Model 1. The purchase was somewhere between a harmless indulgence (my perspective) and a desperate reach for a threadbare writing stereotype (also my perspective). I will admit to daydreams of tinkering with the type mechanism, of slowly bringing the antique machinery to life, of clacking out short stories and articles a la Hemingway, freed from the tyrannical leash of internet-enabled smartphone or laptop.
The Remington duly arrived, all black and silver keys, pockmarked chrome, and decayed rubber – a true relic of pre-war administration. My nascent dreams of amateur tinkering were however soon under threat from a formidable supporting literature discussing carriage returns, ribbon spools, and platen knobs. I began to understand that this was a precision instrument, built in an era where precision, craftsmanship, and longevity mattered; it was not long before I concluded that the Remington Model 1 was far beyond my technical nous.
Continue reading “Excessive Dislike of Extraneous Noise | Article”
How to Write Like Tolstoy
Richard Cohen
Oneworld Publications
£9.99
‘…a sentence or a passage is rhythmical if, when said aloud, it falls naturally into groups of words, each well fitted by length and intonation for its place in the whole and its relation to its neighbours. If you’re writing prose, the best guide is to cultivate an instinct for the difference between what sounds right and what sounds wrong, a syllable-by-syllable attention to sound, a feel for rhyme and breath.’
Review
Despite the incontrovertible fact that reading about writing inevitably (in the short term at least) makes one less productive, it is a habit I frequently fall into. Whether it is writing whilst standing up (Hemingway) or scribbling to the smell of rotten apples (Schiller) it is tempting to believe that if we change one or two writing rituals we will find ourselves blessed with inspiration or writing for sixteen hour stretches. So it was that I added ‘How to Write Like Tolstoy’ to a modest collection including Strunk and White’s ‘Elements of Style’ and Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’.
Continue reading “How to Write Like Tolstoy | Book Review”
Matthew Richardson 