The Writer's Diary

How Horrific Does Horror Need To Be?

Having read and watched a few horrors lately, I have concluded that it is not necessarily how much gore, spooky ghosts, or psychological...

Experimenting With Limited Narrative

Hello again! I am back for the final term of uni, and my god, hasn't the last few months been a train wreck? A cliché metaphor, to use...

Scripts - Development and Exposition

Writing For Stage And Screen is perhaps one of the modules that are the most set apart from other areas of writing. Because, to write a...

Time Travel Shenanigans

How do you format your timelines? Do you plan before you begin writing or let the writing dictate important events in your story? This...

June is June-y. Working on 'Show Don't Tell'

I'm currently completing two assignments, trying to catch up on my reading challenge whilst working a full time job and haven't had much...

Little Flurries of Inspiration

I think my brain has been melting out of my ears. Since returning to uni for the second term, I feel that no particularly gripping ideas...

Parallel World Play

Imagine a world where trending topics were an issue for the past, where Henry VIII is the target of feminist propaganda, or the Vikings...

Back at it

I can shamefully admit that I have not written anything on here in about a month. I was going to use the excuse that I was catching up on...

Fighting Fascism in Fiction

In the last year, we have been faced with very different definitions of fascism. We have had our world turned upside down and some of us...

Dipping In And Out Of Genre

One of my first posts on this blog was about trying to write in a genre I had never tried before. My aim was to incorporate mythological...

Is Cliché OK?

The word cliché is generally used to disvalue the originality of creative work but is it always necessarily a bad thing? As a writer in...

Feminist and Very Unfeminist characters in Fiction

Seeing as it was International Women's day on Monday, I thought I'd take the opportunity to discuss some female role models in modern...

Writing Activism - Are We Being Revolutionary Or Manipulative?

As a fan of contemporary fiction, I feel that this is a question I need to be asking myself. In recent years, we have seen a wave of...

Sci-fi and the Human Error

After trying to dip my toes into different genres, I have circled back to the genre I feel most comfortable in - Science Fiction. I'm not...

Writing from within a bubble - Research vs. Experience

Have you ever read something so ludicrously inaccurate that you've had to shelf the offending article and never wanted to look back at...

Rational vs. Irrational Fears

What are you afraid of? The question itself intimidates me. When asked this in a class on Horror, I could think of many things that I am...

Bending Gender

During my decision making and planning in my two short stories for this term, one thing that has been particularly playing on my mind is...

Modernising Mythology

For our genre module at Uni, we've been asked to write either a short story or the first couple of chapters of a novel. This can either...

Once upon a time, Jen started a blog

As an MA student, I have been asked to keep a Writer's Diary. I've never wrote a blog before so if it looks as though I'm babbling on...