Introducing the Writing Challenges podcast and setting challenge number 1 - The Word Hoard. My Odeo Channel (odeo/47a3e11b60d61c7b) Podshow PDN {podshow-77fc408d91196dd73cc96103e5c946f6}

The relationship between reading and writing and how being an 'original' reader can help with creativity.

Finding your voice will stimulate your progress as a writer. This week's challenge focusses on your self and selves, helping you to get to know the dimensions of your voice.

How to get into the writing 'zone'. How do you translate the desire to write into the will to write?

The role of consciousness in writing and the creative process.

Everything is quarry, everyone is material, and everywhere is fieldwork.

Mess with your brain to get the best writing out of it.

Creative writing's capacity for the creation of illusion-as-truth can make it a dangerous tool.

When we use words, we have to use the right words and the right words in the best order.

Natural magic informs every function of our bodies, our life span and the way we perceive.

Should you be trying to achieve artistic truth in your fiction or writing the next commercial blockbuster?

Form in fiction is a specific and conscious decision, but your final decision may take several drafts and unsuccessful trials before you find that which suits the material best.

Although the marketplace for short stories is difficult, many new writers choose to begin with writing them, almost as a right of passage, a place for honing language, testing their narrative nerve over a shortish distance, and organising a palette.

So, after all, it was a dream... A fiction writer depends on the dream or fantasy of scenes that are true to life or, at least, carry verisimilitude however fantastic the setting or story.

Character is the heart and mind of your story - it is what makes it live.

Where do you, the writer, stand in relation to your characters and readers?

How do I begin?

When reading novels as a writer, you will immediately notice the importance of conflict as the engine of fiction.

All writing is rewriting. With fiction the best test is to read your story aloud, and read it to somebody.