Benjamin McEvoy

Essays on writing, reading, and life

How to Make Time for Writing (Video)

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How do you make more time for writing? How do you balance and juggle your writing career, your vocation, your artistic ambitions with making money? Well, here’s how I do it. Here are the rituals, routines, and mindsets that support my writing. How to Make Time for Writing How do you make time for writing?

Write One True Sentence

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Here’s Hemingway’s advice to writers: All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. All you have to do? Hah! It’s no trifle, I tell you that. Sometimes it takes hours before you can write one true sentence (also why Hemingway rewrote the last page of A […]

Don’t Talk About Writing

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Any time I have talked about the writing instead of writing it, the thing has died. Art is fragile. Especially in the early days of conception. Writing is like drawing. When an artist first makes a sketch, she begins with shapes. Ovals, squares, rectangles, triangles. These will all take shape into faces, torsos, limbs, and hands. […]

How To Create Your Own Targeted Writing Programme

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You’re only a writer if you write every day. But what do you write? And how? Those are the million-dollar questions. If you truly want to be a writer, you’ll write no matter what. It’s not too late. But you also want to build your writing portfolio, amass your literary legacy, sharpen your wordsmith and […]

How to Improve Your Writing with Copywork (Video)

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Today we’re talking about a writing exercise that will improve your craft. You can learn everything from musicality and rhythm in language to character composition and expansion of rational arguments by copying your favourite great authors’ works out by hand. How to Improve Your Writing with Copywork

The Jazz of Jack Kerouac

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In ‘Essentials of Spontaneous Prose’, Kerouac instructed the reader to ‘tap from yourself the song of yourself’. Just one of the many implications that Kerouac viewed the writer’s approach to prose and the approach to poetry as being the same. An idea that was reinforced in his ‘Belief & Technique for Modern Prose’, in which […]

How To Write A Short Story In A Day

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You write a short story the way you read a short story. As quickly as possible. The best way to read a short story is to read it in one sitting.  Reading a short story in one sitting it easy enough. You typically only have one plot line to follow. You have a small range […]

How to Improve as a Writer

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Do you know how you write a book? You spend 2-3 years writing every single day. Write about anything. Everything. Pick a theme and riff. Say, Death – 500 words. Or – Love – shoot for 1,000 words. You do that every day, write to a quota, write whether the Muse turns up or not, […]