What's Your Thinking Style? AUDITORY!

For those of you who think in sounds or words the problems you will face are vastly different from writers who are visual. Now there are pros and cons to being an auditory thinker. Classically, most writers ARE auditory, but there are many successful writers who are also visual. Why is this so? Well, it goes something like this: Auditory thinkers often have a "voice" talking in the back of their heads. By simply "tuning" in to this voice, writers...

What's Your Thinking Style? VISUAL!

Writers who are visual often claim they have "writer's block". The reason is quite simple: Visual people have hot and intense visual narratives running through their mind's eye: the moment they put a pen in their hand and touch nib to paper or fingers to keyboard keys their imagination flags.  How is it possible to take a picture made up of a thousand words and start it with one word? Actually, it's quite easy. You storyboard. That doesn't...

What's Your Thinking Style?

Often, when teaching creative writing, this is the first question I ask. Why is it so important? I think that your thinking style sets out how you will write, the difficulties you will face, and knowing what style you think in will enhance your writing. But what do I mean, by thinking style? Well, let me ask you another question! Do you think in pictures? Do you have a voice in the back of your head? Do you see pictures AND hear sounds? Do...

The End in Mind

This is the one thing that if you do it, it makes all the difference in attaining your goals: Visualise the end. See it Hear it Feel it Writing goals and aims down is brilliant, but also inscribe them, etch them into your mind and go over them again and again, daily, weekly, but visualise them, in fact I would suggest you:Draw themPaint themThe more vividly you see, hear and feel your goal, the more tangible, the more likely you are to achieve...

What Do All Writers Have in Common?

There's one thing, one thing alone all writers have in common. It comes before a writer becomes...a writer. And it follows ever after. It is a sort of being. And in this being and fulfillment and song and motion the parameters are set for all the things that a writer will become later on. Before a writer becomes a writer, they are first a reader. So read and read and read And then perhaps you can write and write and write. ZHZ....

Editing: Super Tips

Dear Writer, here are some golden tips for shaping your writing, whether you're polishing a short story or a fifty book series: 1. Remove dialogue tags such as "said" - most of these are redundant or to put it another way, dialogue should speak for itself. 2. Delete weasle words such as: very little pretty really almost seem even that up/down in/out tried to... reached... 3. Use positive terms, not negatives e.g. instead of "he didn't come"...

A Writer's Life: 16th July 2008

So where am I today in my wordsmithery? Well, I'd say I'm in the middle of lots of projects: 1. I'm writing the follow-up to the The Curry Mile . 2. I'm working on drafting my first screenplay...big budget. 3. I'm thought-showering another screenplay...small budget 4. I'm planning the next edit of a children's book I've been in the process of moving house for the last couple of months which has meant everything's been up in the ether. I write...

How to use Robin Hood to Write Your Own Story

One of the biggest challenges any writer faces is determining which "voice" is apt to tell his or her tale. Now, when I talk about "voice" I'm not referring to "Point of View", that is, whether a story is told through a first person narrative, a third person omniscient perspective and so on. No, I'm referring to the character behind the voice. The "voice" itself could be told from different Points of View. ROBIN HOOD STORYLet me clarify: if I said...

The Spoken Synopsis

Novelists invariably have to write a synopsis. It is true that many great writers probably never wrote one, but I can assure that agents and publishers always want to see one. Many who have chosen the world of the pen as their journey, sometimes find it difficult to understand what a synopsis is, why it is the way it is, why it's even needed. Other writers wouldn't write home without it. You could say that it's the literary equivalent of a business plan. And it is true that the map is not the territory, the synopsis is not the book. Here are...

What Published Writers MUST do

If you are a published writer then there is something I strongly recommend you do that could absolutely alter - for the better - your experience of the writing life. I believe it's a sad world we live in when those who create entire worlds for others are paid a pittance, but such is our reality. For those of us who are writers we must do what we can to get by comfortably so that we can continue creating new worlds of words. Firstly, join The Society...

A Writer's Life: 29th Feb 2008

A quick rundown of some stats on the running of my website www.zahidhussain.co.uk - as of today, I'm getting visits from 41 countries around the world which is absolutely amazing.I have no idea how people from Iran, Japan and Washington State in the U.S. are hearing about my work. I am agog. ZHZ. ...

A Writer's Life: 28th Feb 2008

I write every day. I don't write from nine till five, simply because I can't - I work full-time and the little time that remains is all I have to offer my muse. I wanted to share some of my world with you...few writers are willing to open the door and let would-be writers into their abode. As I've said many times before, before I became a writer I was a reader. I want to see new writers emerge, like a leviathan from the deep, water spraying the...

The Biggest Secret of Writing

I'm going to reveal a big secret, perhaps the biggest of all. It's as sharp and tingly as a slap in the face, it's simply this: Writing is not writing. "Eh?" You gasp, "Zahid's lost it this time. He's joined the Circus of the Lunatics". Let me explain. Writing is not about taking a pen in your hand and writing. Writing is not about sitting in front of a PC and typing. Writing is not about sitting with a Dictaphone and speaking out your thoughts. Writing is the process by which you fling your imagination into the real world. In fact, some...

The W Spot

I am a firm believer that Writer's Block doesn't exist. Or rather, I choose to believe it doesn't. However, that's only partially true: it's true for me, but it might not be for you. Like many things, it's all about your state of mind. If I could guarantee that with the click of your fingers you could hit that zone inside yourself, that prefect place where writing is born, unleashed all by itself you'd bite my right arm off. And like the best...

Tolstoy vs Dostoyevsky

They say that the novel is dead. I don't think that's true. However, I think it is acutely accurate that the novels which writers like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky wrote won't be written again. Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, strong and distinctive voices of the past, will forever resound in our ears and their tales will flicker into life on our television screens. But those works will not be repeated. I am a passionate reader. Sometimes it hurts that...

Pen or Keyboard?

Before the advent of the typewriter and way before the PC, writers wrote with pens and pencils and everything was simple. Now you there is a plethora of software and geeky devices to help catalyse the writing process. So much easier you'd think and yet oddly so much harder. So which is it to be: pen or keyboard? Let me tell you what I've gleaned from fellow writers. I've heard virtually every variation beneath the heavens: Some write and rewrite longhand and and then pass their musings to a typist Some write their first draft longhand and then...