**Trigger warning: Discussion of eating disorders** (middle school) The tiles were cold against my skin. In the pitch-black of the night, in our tiny box of a bathroom, I sprawled out. The scratchy blue rug – the old one my father had been begging my mother to throw away for years – acted as my…
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The whimsical image of a writer brings to mind thoughts of troubled souls shut away in dark rooms, with a piece of paper and a pencil, or a typewriter, pouring their creations onto the page in deep isolation. When the writing isn’t going, that doesn’t matter, the writer can take a walk, or indulge in…
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Certainty kills one’s curiosity and blinds one’s mind’s eye to the wondrous questions we need to ask ourselves as we write. Uncertainty should be our guide. Likewise self-doubt is something all serious writers worth their salt wrestle with. Without some self-doubt and uncertainty one would descend into a self-satisfied mediocrity. Yet for someone who endures…
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Granta is one of those literary journals you’re told to subscribe to when you study writing. It publishes the full gamut of linguistic genres – poetry, prose, fiction, non-fiction – in quarterly instalments. Usually the writing it features kind of makes a budding writer ashamed to call themselves a ‘writer’ while the understated beauty of…
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Continuing on from my last column on whether or not writers should be paid for writing for the internet, this week I read an article about author Joe Simpson (Touching the Void), who decided to split from his publisher Random House over a dispute about ebook royalties. Random House were prepared to offer Simpson 25…
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In celebration of women’s voices, Lip is launching the Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction. This is a themed fiction competition, open to all ages and genders. Rachel Funari, the namesake of the competition, was the founding editor of Lip. Tragically, Rachel went missing in 2011, while on holiday in Tasmania. We are launching the prize in…
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A debate which has been brewing for a long time flared up again recently: should writers expect to be paid for writing for publication on the internet? Online publications Mamamia and The Hoopla recently published pieces on why they don’t pay writers (Mamamia) and why they do (The Hoopla). The Mamamia article in particular seems…
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I know I said writing is all about finding time to write. I wrote that I would do this, despite all my other commitments for the month of November, as I can’t call myself a writer unless I make the effort to find the time to write. Well, okay – I won’t call myself a…
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I’ve come to the realisation that taking part in NaNoWriMo as a uni student is not the best idea. November is the month where final assignments are due and the end-of-semester frenzy kicks into gear. It is also the month where summer days start filling the week with wonderful regularity and, to top it all…
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November is fast approaching. For some, that means the end of another semester of uni or the start of summer. For the aspiring novelists of the world, that means gearing up for another NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is an event where writers attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. That…
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Name: Gemma Watson Age: 20 Occupation: Writer, student, retail/shop assistant, bookworm. How would you describe yourself and your life? I grew up in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne on a steady diet of politics, comedy and literature. Casual work, full-time study, and coffee are my daytime pursuits while at night I am furiously honing my…
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Name: Ebonie Hyland Age: 21 Occupation: Student, Writer How would you describe yourself and your life? I spent the first 18 years of my life in Warrnambool, in the same little house with a white picket fence on the top of a hill near the sea. It was a humble, quiet existence, driven by music,…
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It’s less than two weeks until our One Night Stand with Voiceworks! This week we interviewed Editor Kat Muscat about young writers, indie publishing and what Voiceworks is looking for. Voiceworks in two words? Here 2 Stay (see what I did there?). Why should we read Voiceworks – what makes it so awesome? All of the…
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Ali, the narrator of The Memory of Salt, describes drawing a line in the middle of herself (or perhaps himself, as the author never discloses the gender of the narrator), designating one side as Melburnian, the other as Turkish. While her mother is an Australian paediatrician, her father, Ahmet, is a Turkish musician who joined…
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