But it isn’t just a book, or novel – the stuff of our life and dreams can be turned into short stories, poetry, radio plays and even journalism!

You don’t have to be hanging by your fingernails from a cliff edge or wrestling with creatures from the deep to make your story interesting – there is plenty of material in ordinary life! So if subjects to write about are all around us, how come some people make such gripping and memorable writing from it?

How do some find an eager audience and even make a living from their writing? It’s what they do with it and how they do it that matters! Good writing is to partly to do with creating character, finding the telling detail in a scene, using the senses to bring things to life. It’s partly about using stunning images in your poems; silence in your radio play; plotting your novel well; dashing off a magazine story or writing a crisp review.

But it's also about knowing how to get rhythm into your poetry, finding the best and briefest paragraph that will tell the most in a short story, discovering the differences between a stereotype and a rounded character who will stay in your reader’s mind, using the appropriate language and sentence-length in a news story or profile feature for your local newspaper, writing regularly about your hobby for a specialist magazine! It’s mostly about sincerity, style, initiative, daring, and creativity. It’s about your creativity: that need you have to express yourself and the sense you have that it would be wonderful to be able to write something good.

The beauty of writing is that it is something that can be done anytime, anywhere, and at any age. You may not win a Nobel Prize but there are definitely learnable techniques that will help you towards achieving stylishness and professionalism in every area of interest in your writing career. If you have always written poetry but feel out of touch with what’s being done today and shy about attempting your own, you will be directed to some of the finest and best-selling practitioners of recent times and get a glimpse of some of their methods.

If you want to be a newspaper reporter, you can learn how news stories and features are written, and how to develop a free-lance life. You can study the construction of a radio drama and how to establish the plot and theme of your novel. Think of the infinite delight of creating stories and poems into your nineties! It is being done, and by some of the most fulfilled and curious and young-at-heart individuals on the planet!

My book helps you to discover your inner creative writer, be it a poet, a novelist, a short story writer, a radio dramatist or a journalist. It suggests how to get your work out there: what standards you need to attain to get noticed by publishers and agents. It’s up to you how far you want to take your writing life: this is not an academic tome full of rules and tests, but a readable handbook to help and guide you.

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