Improving your writing by reading

A strange thing happens when I'm reading fiction now. I used to become absorbed in the story, part of the characters and world, but now I seem to read them in the same way I imagine a god of Olympus would watch humanity; sometimes joining in but also looking down from above and seeing the bigger picture. This particularly happens when there's a problem with what I'm reading. It's normal for that to cause a jolt that bumps you out of the fictional world, but I used to ignore it and keep going. Now I stop, and reread the section until I can work out what went wrong. A recent book I read had me doing this a lot; Darkness Falling by Peter Crowther.

Spring Cleaning

You may have noticed some changes round here. This is the first iteration of updates to this ol' blog, with the eventual aim to pull it all back to the basics, while keeping the content front and centre. I also want to get more of the feel of the kind of stories I seem to end up writing: a bit dark, with a touch of creepiness thrown in.  I've been meaning to do this for a while but kept putting it off, as it can end up taking a lot longer than planned. So instead I'm doing this in sprints.*

The next stage will see links to my new tumblr page added somewhere, and maybe some more jiggery pokery with the layout. In the meantime you can check my very small tumblr feed over at Stained Fingers - my attempt to catalogue non-writing, art-related endeavours, and the kinds of pictures/images that inspire me every day. There will be some writery stuff popping up there, but those will also be mentioned here. But the art stuff will stay solely on that tumblr, hopefully resulting in a more streamlined, focused blog and tumblr feed.

So this post isn't entirely about me, here's a very cool and very true film about storytelling, but is just as relevant to any of the creative arts. Enjoy!

*Working in an online only business is clearly rubbing off on me...