Greetings to everyone and welcome to my website, The Joy of Writing! My hope is that people will come here and be interested in exploring this further. I deal with all kinds of writing, but mostly fiction as that is where I specialise. The site offers online tutorials at €20 euro an hour. I want to share my experience working in creative writing workshops and create an atmosphere where writing is a joyous activity – a balance between freedom of expression and control of style.
There is a skit of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land purporting to be a first draft of the great poem. The poet has written and crossed out “May December August is the cruellest month” and a laconic scribble in the margin reads “Try ‘April’ ”
The joke comes close to the truth. Beginnings that sound portentous and pre-ordained can be created by a writer after an intuitive leap on the ninths draft of the damn thing – ah yes, this is how it should start! And it sounds as if the words just emailed themselves into your head from god@almighty.org. How could it ever have been any other way? How could Jane Austen not have started Pride and Prejudice with “It is a truth universally acknowledged…”?
The reality of beginnings is that they can be tricky, clumsy and downright maladroit at first. Often you need at least two paragraphs to get properly warmed up. That is why the real beginning of a story can be a page in. Or even, God help us, sixty pages in!
I am hoping that the start of this website will be a good distance away from its full inception. I am looking forward to being able to post more resources online, including regular updates of this blog and tasters of my style on Youtube clips, as well as links to more resources I find useful (check out the Links page for some that I have already noted)
In the meantime, thank you for visiting and – enjoy!
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