Scriptwriting Competition List. Includes International and UK competitions for screenwriters and playwrights. This post has now moved to my writing blog Free Your Pen here: https://jesdavidson.wordpress.com/2021/01/02/screenwriting-competitions-scripts-stage-plays/
Novel Writing Competition List. Includes international and UK competitions for unpublished and self-published novels and novellas. This post has now moved to my writing blog here: https://jesdavidson.wordpress.com/2021/01/30/novel-writing-competitions-list/
I’ve struggled with Morning Pages for years. I would do them for a bit and then quit. Start again. Quit again. Repeat. Then last week I finally worked out why: I understand the problem with Morning Pages and I know how to fix it. If you don’t already know, Morning Pages is a writing practice… Continue reading Getting the most out of Morning Pages
I’ve lost my voice. It sneaked off when I wasn’t looking. One day I realised I was no longer telling the truth. Every time I sat down to write a blog post or work on my latest book, a tiny part of me died. I knew there was something I needed to say – but… Continue reading A Confession: I’ve lost my voice
I started self-publishing early and, as it turns out, I was writing fantasy and science fiction right from the start! My first books were small but ambitious, and lavishly illustrated. In Write Like a Beginner I shared one of these stories – Creepy Castle – which wasn’t really a book, more a couple of sheets… Continue reading My First (handmade!) Books
A little while ago I went to a Writing for Wellbeing workshop and one of the exercises was called ‘Writing Like a Beginner’. The idea was to stop worrying about getting it right and just write any old stuff – like you did when you were a child. It frees you up and gets you… Continue reading Write Like a Beginner: A Silly Tale of Derring-Do
“Right Mindfulness: Write Thought” is the old tagline for this blog. In this post from a few years ago, I explain what it means… I thought it was about time I explained the tagline of this site: Right Mindfulness: Write Thought is a Buddhist pun based on two of the steps on the Eightfold Path… Continue reading Right Mindfulness: Write Thought
I wrote a Fantasy novel by accident. That’s not an easy accident to have; not like tripping over your own feet or walking into a glass door. It’s not that I was trying to write something else and it turned into Fantasy. I wasn’t aiming for any genre in particular – I just wrote the… Continue reading Fantasy Fiction: a genre distinction too far
I know the exact day I became a writer. It was Friday 23rd April 2004 and I was walking to work. As I dodged the rush hour traffic, a story unspooled into my mind that was so compelling I knew I must write it down. I arrived at work, grabbed some paper and scribbled down… Continue reading Why Do Writers Write?
As promised, here’s an extract from the first chapter of my novel about human angels, The Shining Ones. It’s set in the near future in a slowly disintegrating but familiar world which has been devastated after a solar storm. The storm triggered a mutation in a small number of people, called Deviants by the ARK… Continue reading The Shining Ones: first chapter extract
The rejections for my latest novel The Shining Ones are starting to roll in. The first came from Gollancz and I wasn’t that surprised, so the title of this post is a bit misleading. As writers we’re supposed to be cut up by rejections, but I couldn’t muster the energy to care. Perhaps I’ve got… Continue reading Slush Pile Woes: the first rejection cuts the deepest
Ideas for novels often spring from unexpected places. The seed that became the sprout that grew into my latest novel arrived in the form of a disappointingly bad writing exercise. The exercise itself wasn’t the problem. You just had to take the opening line of a novel and then continue to write for half an… Continue reading How a bad writing exercise seeded The Shining Ones
Jessica Davidson 