10 tips to learn from a creative writing lecturer

Some people enjoy writing for the sake of it, while others want to develop and improve. If you fall into the latter category then read this. A creative writing lecturer and published author with a new novel The Dark Light out in July 2015, Julia Bell is one of the UK’s foremost authorities on creative writing. Here, she shares with us the top ten pieces of advice she gives her students at the start of each year.   Sometimes as a teacher you feel like you’re trapped in a groundhog day, repeating the same pieces of advice every year, just to a different cohort of students, although as I get older and more forgetful perhaps I’m just repeating myself and students are being too polite to call me on it. In any given year these are the pointers about writing good prose – novels and stories – that I find myself saying over and over, but they are also in themselves, light bulb moments from my own practice as writer.   (Read the Rest)