Research into great sentences, has led to some back-to-basics videos on You Tube, and reminded me how useful basics can be. It’s also made me think about how you lovely students can link out of one course, to use ideas from another source – so for instance, if you took your ‘Why I write’ exercise from the Complete Freelance Writing Course, you could review your sentences and check your sentence use. Do you favour simple, compound, complex ones or a combination of compound/complex ones for instance?

This research has also reminded me of three other vital requirements in a sentence: it needs to carry one idea, have a subject and a verb.

Now for those of you who may think ‘Yeah, yeah, I know all this – give me some challenge here!’, I offer an idea. We can use these units of analysis to get clarity on any sort of writing project – novel series, copywriting, screenplay or collection of poems: what’s the big idea carried here? Who or what are the subjects? And what are their actions?

Indeed, it seems to me that if you’re carrying round a blurry set of ideas in your head about a future project, just answering these questions could help a lot, especially if you doodle your answers down and start to map relationships. You can consider how they interact, as well as how they act.

A favorite theme here is how versatile and cross platform writing can profit, and also stimulate and develop we writers. Where we learn from can also serve these ends. So for instance quite a lot of the advice here on how to introduce your movie character is relevant for novelists, short story writers, and even creative non-fiction writers.

As another reminder of options open to writers, here’s my pal and podcast partner, Emma, in action on a women’s heritage walk last week. She’s on the right, in full flow, giving us vivid and memorable details about the Suffragette demo, that occurred on the steps here. We writers often make great heritage guides!

Finally, this month, here’s a fun suggestion for reviving your writing mojo, and an encouragement to become strange again. And if it’s holiday time where you are, may you revive, recharge and refuel those creative gremlins.