Pippa got off the bus and followed the crowd of teenagers, all dressed in jeans, white sneakers and some jacket or hoodie with a brand screaming across it, so much for ‘no uniform’. They streamed through the wide doors open of an old stone building, and flowed into the corridors, or up the stairs as …
Rebecca watched the raindrops chase each other down the giant wall of glass facing her desk. It was a glorious view on sunny days, but on ones like this, when the clouds came low and the rain looked like it was ready for a re-do of the forty days and forty nights flood story, it …
An exercise from Ursula Le Guin’s Steering the Craft book – write one piece with sentences of seven or fewer words, then one that's all one sentence... Exercise 3a – Short Octavia hung back, scared. She didn’t want to go in there. It was dangerous, everyone said so. Why did Roz have to dare them? …
An exercise from Ursula Le Guin's Steering the Craft book - write a piece of narrative with no punctuation... People were all around her shouting dancing singing hugging kissing laughing and all she could see was the sky with its low grey clouds that wanted to rain but were being kept off by the blast …
Alex breathed in and centred himself, if Grandma could chop wood, a hale and healthy man in his twenties would have no problem. The axe felt strange in his hands, warm, heavy in a way that spoke more of possibility than actual heft. The wooden handle worn smooth from years of use, the steel head, …
Every now and again, I go through Ursula Le Guin's book on writing Steering the Craft and do some of the exercises in there. It was the first fine day since he’d arrived on the island, his first chance to get out and breathe. To walk, and think, and escape the suffocating care of his …
The DNA of Stories 