How to write – the spaces in between

Had a great weekend at two Newark Jazz Festival. Sultry, funny, engaging concert with Claire Martin and Richard Rodney Bennett and then on Sunday a storming set with Tim Kliphuis a Dutch jazz fiddler. His fingers worked so fast they almost had smoke coming off them!

I’ve talked about rhythm in writing before and…

how important it is. Listening to Claire Martin I thought about how a great singer, of whatever kind, can make you think completely differently about a song just by the phrasing they adopt. Peggy Lee was another singer who could stretch a phrase out till you expected it to break then pull it back just in time to make a different sense of it.

While driving to and from Newark we listened to Radio 3’s Chopin weekend. One quote I heard about was from the pianist Artur Schnabel who said of himself, “I probably don’t play the notes any better than any other pianist. But I play the spaces in between better.”

As I’m putting the writing workshop together I’m thinking of all the questions delegates might want answered. And I’ve been wondering about touching on punctuation since many people seem confused about it these days. I don’t want to teach my grandmother to suck eggs but…

For a writer I believe that punctuation is there for one reason only. To make the writing clearer and easier to read. And it can act as our spaces in between.

Just a reminder about the workshop. How To Write a Book Workshop, 28/29 June in Nottingham. Covering punctuation (probably) the five stages of writing (definitely) and how to manage the whole project of writing a book(without it driving you mad!). For more details see the special web page – How To Write a Book Workshop – and remember the early bird booking discount stops after 31st May.