Myriorama cards are slices of landscape paintings that can be arranged in any order to form continuous scenes. They were invented in the early 19th century by the French artist, Jean-Pierre Brès, as a genteel amusement and an aid to practice drawing composition. I first heard Sir Philip Pullman recommend them for writing inspiration in his BBC… Read More
The new His Dark Materials TV series started today! But that’s no excuse to shirk our writing duties… especially if, like me, you’re currently engaged in writing 50,000 words a month for NaNoWriMo. Complete this word crawl to enjoy Northern Lights (and your own story) in a new light… What is a word crawl? A… Read More
To celebrate the launch of The Secret Commonwealth, I thought I would share this deck of alethiometer cards I created. As alethiometers are even rarer in our world than in Lyra’s, I hope these cards can help you hone your skills in their stead. Click here to download the cards (ZIP) Printing Your Cards I recommend… Read More
The underworld is perhaps the most important motif in mythology and literature – tied up with ideas about life, the afterlife, belief, culture, storytelling, and the psyche, it’s the setting of humanity’s reckoning with the ephemeral nature of mortality.
As writers, we can use the motif of the underworld in two aspects:
The underworld as world of adventure
The underworld as world of the dead
Despite having received hundreds of emails from writers asking me if I knew how to overcome writer’s block… I remained a skeptic. I simply didn’t believe in writer’s block. I thought it was a phrase made up to excuse writers who were too lazy or unmotivated to sit down and do what they loved. Now that… Read More
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