Croydon Writers

• Finish the day’s writing when you still want to continue.
• Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don’t yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
• Read Keats’s letters.
• 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.
• Learn poems by heart.
• Join professional organisations which advance the collective rights of authors.
• A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.
•  If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of JG Ballard. (Ballard was a devoted father who brought up three children alone after his wife’s early death)
• Don’t worry about posterity – as Larkin (no sentimentalist) observed “What will survive of us is love

From the Guardian