May 22, 2024
Would you expect to become a top concert pianist if you never practised your scales? If you didn't practise your serve, would you expect to win Wimbledon? The building blocks underpinning any skill might be difficult and repetitive to learn, but they are essential if you want to be the best. Initially, it can seem that they are holding you back, and stifling your creativity and flair, but if you practise enough, the basics become second-nature, and you get them right without even having to think about it.
I've come across writers who believe that punctuation and grammar aren't important, and that only the creativity matters. I would agree that worrying too much about punctuation and grammar when you're writing a first draft can interrupt your flow. It's especially important that it shouldn't hold children back from following their imagination. However, if you know the rules, you won't be tripped up by uncertainty about them. You also will be less likely to be confused by what you've written when you go back to edit it–and oh, yes–you will need to edit it.
Of course, there are authors who have broken the 'rules', but they have done it deliberately to achieve particular effects, such as Daniel Keyes in Flowers for Algernon, whose narrator is for much of the work educationally 'challenged', or James Joyce, who wanted to replicate the stream-of-consciousness in Ulysses. In these instances, they are not making mistakes; they know what they're doing and are consistent.
Mistakes in grammar, punctuation or spelling put a barrier between your words and your readers. Plus, they make you look amateurish and unreliable. Worse still, sloppy manuscripts make it appear that you don't care about your work, and no writer wants that, do they?
Posted by K. S. Dearsley.
April 22, 2024
I always knew there were two camps when it came to poetry. Some people feel that unless it has an obvious rhyme, it isn't a proper poem. Inexact rhymes, they feel, are cheating. Others enjoy the combination of concepts with rhythms and singular language in free verse. If you want to start a debate between them ask whether William Carlos Williams's 'This is Just to Say' is really a poem. In my opinion it is, because of the way it makes you appreciate the sound of the words and the feel of them...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Linguistics
April 15, 2024
With everything bursting into life outside, I've been tackling some long overdue tidying indoors before the garden demands my attention. One of the cupboards whose contents jump out at me every time I open the door, is the one where I store all my manuscripts–well, most of them.
I started to sort it out last year, but apart from discarding some manuscripts of stories that I've subsequently changed, and making sure I had hard copies of everything, that was as far as I got. The fact is, I hav...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley.
March 18, 2024
Last Friday was a first for me. I attended the initial reading by Theze Guyz of my one-act play,
Tea Party of the Gods. It was a real pleasure to be there at the start of the play's first production.
Theze Guyz are an amateur company set up to give everyone, no matter their abilities or experience, a chance to perform. This year is the company's 21st anniversary, and they're planning to mark it with three performances of three plays. I'm honoured to have been asked to supply one of them.
Tea ... Continue reading...
Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Coming Soon
March 3, 2024
A new edition of
Artists & Liars is now out with three extra pieces. And that's not all: it's also now available in paperback with illustrations by yours truly. You'll find three poems, two flash stories and nine short stories about the art world from every angle, including clumsy cleaners, bashful models, and self-centred divas.
I'm still very involved in the art world both professionally and socially, so in a few years' time
Artists & Liars might get even fatter–or maybe I'll have enough ...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Coming Soon
February 6, 2024
Writing competitions ask writers not to put their name on their manuscripts, so there can be no question of the judges being influenced by their identity. Most writers would dearly love to be so well-known! Competitions aside, there is a school of thought that if you're proud of your work, you should stick to using your real name and not a pseudonym–not least because you want any royalty cheque to be accepted by your bank–but there are many instances when a writer might choose to use a pe...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley.
January 26, 2024
It started out as a nice easy task that might take an afternoon. All I had to do was upload
Artists & Liars to print format, adjust the digital cover and bish, bash, bosh–I'd have a paperback to satisfy the friends who have been asking me for another book. That was the plan.
The trouble is, once I'd formatted the text, I decided it could do with some illustrations. One image for each story meant drawing, scanning and formatting nine illustrations, which was a little beyond my comfort zone. ...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Coming Soon
December 19, 2023
Was it John Lennon who said that life is what happens while you're making plans for something else? Whoever said it, they were right. This has been brought home to me particularly strongly in the past weeks, in both my personal and my writing life.
For the past month or so I've been working on a few long-held projects. The first is to design business cards, bookmarks and postcards to help promote my books, provide something interesting for readers to collect and to make me look more professio...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Coming Soon
December 2, 2023
Is there a writer on the planet who isn't an avid reader? That might be why the recent Northampton Book Group's 'picnic' was attended by so many writers. They weren't there to plug their work although, naturally, they mentioned it, but predominantly they were there for their love of books.
We chatted about what we'd been reading recently, favourite authors and genres, and what started us reading, as well as swapping books and trying new genres. What was obvious was the pleasure reading brings...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Inspiration
November 9, 2023
I've said this before, I know, but the anthology with my SF story, 'The Adult Prodigy', in it is about to be published. I've finally been given a launch date of 18th November, so it looks as if patience really does pay off.
The anthology is called
Dark Horses and features stories by local authors and Arts Lab members from around the UK, including the renowned Alan Moore. It's been put together by Donna Scott, whose story, 'Smiley Wakes Up', also appears. I've already read all the stories. The...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Coming Soon
