The Wicked Writing Blog

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Showing Tag: "creative writing" (Show all posts)

Three great tips from an old crime writer

Posted by John Yeoman on Friday, August 12, 2011, In : The Writing Craft 
It’s amazing what you can learn from old crime writers, even when they’re poor authors.

I have just been reading Malcolm Sage, Detective (1921) by Herbert George Jenkins. He wrote around the time of Edgar Wallace but he lacked Wallace’s manic ingenuity. Jenkins, in a word, is stagy.

In his tales, the butler really does do it, the reader is presented with just two possible suspects of which one is blatantly a decoy, and the villain is called - nudge, nudge - ‘Sir Jasper’. That said, J...
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The scandalous truth about creative writing programs

Posted by John Yeoman on Monday, July 11, 2011, In : Libels & Wickedness 
News that Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of the troubled News of the World, has now been arrested in the phone tapping scandal raises fresh doubts - previously unsuspected - about the ethics of creative writing programs. Let me explain...

I've just had a delightful end-term lunch with my fellow tutors at the university where, to the distress of publishers, I teach creative writing. To evade campus professors and other spies, we huddled toge...
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Creative writing opportunities at the New College of the Humanities

Posted by John Yeoman on Thursday, June 9, 2011, In : Libels & Wickedness 
Britain’s parents are still recoiling from news that London’s latest university, the New College of the Humanities (NCH), will charge £18,000 ($28,000) a year for a syllabus that embraces ‘science literacy, critical thinking, logic and applied ethics’ but does not include creative writing.

Given that all the world wants to pen a blockbuster - or, more profitably, be Sarah Palin’s ghost-writer - this oversight is odd. There’s a lot of money to be made offering courses in creative w...
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John Yeoman

Dr John Yeoman, MA Oxon, MPhil, PhD Creative Writing, FSRS*  is a UK university tutor in the short story. He has 42 years experience as a successful commercial writer, newspaper editor and one-time chairman of a major PR consultancy.

He has published innumerable works of humour, some intended to be humorous.

* Founder, the Society for the Rehabilitation of the Semi-colon