Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

i wish i was away in Ingo far across the briny sea sailing over deepest waters where neither care nore worry trouble me

If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.