Creative Writing
If your interest in the Oulipo goes beyond simply trying out their techniques, and you wish to learn about the context in which it was conceived and the developments in went through, you will find this book very useful.
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Saxophonist, by Terry Freedman
Writing in different voices, genres or styles is a really good way of improving one’s skills.
Read MoreA long-held belief of mine is that no writing is wasted. I hear of people who have spent time writing something, decided it's rubbish, and then deleted it. But the process of evaluation that someone goes through to arrive at the conclusion that the thing they've just slaved over is rubbish is valuable in itself.
Read MoreI have a course coming up, one that I’m teaching. I asked an AI writer to draft a press release for it. Here’s what it came up with, with my annotations in italics and in square brackets.
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Many people advocate free writing as a way of cutting through writer’s block. Well, it’s never worked for me, and it doesn’t seem logical anyway. If you can’t think of anything to write, how would allowing your mind to just generate stuff do any good?
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Terrified, by Dall-e
Someone challenged me to write a graphic novel of my short story A Bang on the Head, which forms the basis of my experiments in style, à la Queneau. Well, I’m useless at drawing the kind of comics I like to read, so I thought I’d enlist the help of AI. I used this prompt, mistakenly, with ChatGPT…
Read MoreI wrote this article in 2020. Having read it again, I still agree with the views I expressed then. In fact, I’d go further. When anyone who has achieved the benefits potentially offered by X tells you that you don’t need X, I think a huge dollop of cynicism is in order.
Read MoreWhy I can’t read Lolita, but am reading Nabokov’s short stories.
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Image created by Dall-E for Terry Freedman
“Terry has a great ability to grasp and capture the everyday, as well as an excellent feel for the quotidian conversations and dialogues that make up so much of our ordinary lives out in the real world. And from this he is able to mine real meaning and insight.” From Tom Bevan’s introduction to this essay.
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Rainham Marshes, by Terry Freedman
Can you spot the hidden theme word?
Read MoreI’ve been taking a short and very bland story and rewriting it in different styles. This time I’ve chosen cockney (defined as someone born within the sound of Bow bells, in other words a true working class Londoner) rhyming slang.
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Aurora and Terry, by Terry Freedman
I’m not known for writing poetry, much less in the style of the 16th century. But I’ve had a go, and I like to think that my poetry is a bit better than my art.
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As you may know, I’ve been exchanging letters online with Rebecca Holden. We agree that we’d write three letters each. We’ve enjoyed the experiment so much that we’ve decided to continue with it after the Christmas break.
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Snow in station by Terry Freedman
Here in England it’s cold, though not quite as cold as it has been, and walking and cycling are treacherous.
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An outdoor cafe, by Terry Freedman
I’ve written a piece called My Life in Cafés. I wanted it to be bittersweet, a mixture of pathos and humour.
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mail, by Terry Freedman
Have you read any works written in the form of letters? Or have you written anything like that yourself? I've been interested in that genre for a long time, so I was delighted when, a few weeks ago, a course came up at the City Lit institute looking at epistolary fiction.
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Me reflecting on stuff. Photo by Elaine Freedman
I write about literature, life in general, odd things that have happened, the odd bit of fiction, experimental writing.
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Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
It’s a very rare occasion that finds me attending a large-scale meeting. In my experience, quite often nothing gets done as a result of it.
Read MoreEvery so often I read a blog post or a ‘commentary’ on Twitter by some self-appointed guru or other saying that blogging is passé.
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Fodder, by Terry Freedman
