January 2026 …
During the holiday break I have been reading Stephen King’s much lauded and quoted book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. One of King’s pearls of wisdom, supported by many others, is the necessity of practising the art of writing. This is not about developing a beautiful handwriting script or learning to touch-type – it’s about practising word-play and letting stories emerge from fragments of ideas.
We all marvel at the creativity of performers of dance or music, as well as painters, sketchers and sculptors who create amazing artworks that stimulate our emotions and reactions.
Behind the public presentation lies hundreds or thousands of hours of work, practising small skills and techniques. Ultimately this culminates in complex patterns, and finally an assessable result.
So it is with writing. Practice can take many forms. One common piece of advice is to write something every single day. The prescribed number of words per day varies from, say, 500 to 2,000 – with the end result that after X number of days you will have accumulated 80,000+ words and will be in the realm of having completed a novel.
For me, the daily word limit is somewhat arbitrary; what matters is what I write. I regularly enter short story competitions with word limits of 500 to 1,500 words. The topics are set by others so the creative task is to write a story with a start, middle and end. The story must have a point, the characters must be distinct, and redundant words and phrases must be pared back. All of this is excellent practice for writing scenes and chapters in long-form novels.
I have recently signed up to the NYC Midnight 250 word Microfiction Challenge competition which spans three rounds. The competitors are not only assigned keywords but also a specific genre. If you progress to the next round you are then assigned a new genre and keywords. The challenge of writing in an unfamiliar genre is very appealing. Whilst story-writing principles are the same, as a writer I am thrust into a new space where I am forced to quickly identify the essence of the genre, understand the power that every word contributes to the story arc, and reach a satisfying conclusion – hopefully one that is both surprising and intriguing to the judges.
Since my wife, Monique, works in a publishing/editing space, she has a deep appreciation of grammar and writing craft. Our banter often centres on verbal word-play, highlighting unusual words, laughing about phrases that are vague or tautological, and pointing out poor or unnecessary use of adverbs. This fun word-play also helps me develop my writing craft, and is inevitably a form of practice. When putting pen to paper or typing at a keyboard, the familiar echoes of our banter meet with the rules of the competitions, with the end result that often a unique and interesting story emerges effortlessly.
All of this broadening of the habitual writing experience leads to more interesting works in both long and short form; reducing the number of drafts required to produce a unique, polished work. The experimental word-play provided by daily writing seeps into new stories and gives them a uniqueness that makes creative writing seem effortless.