Tag: Writing

Some of you will be having a quieter Christmas than many, and some creatives will be using this time as a way to get down to some work.

In this podcast I share some thoughts about writing. I’ve been an author, editor and online content creator, and I have no idea how many hours I’ve sat at typewriters and computers for sixtyish years, creating yardages of verbiage in print.

I guess my mother handed me that gene – she was a prizewinning shorthand secretary in the 1940s.

This isn’t about sentence structure or punctuation. It’s about getting on the flow. Getting it down – it involves a lot of fingerwork on keyboards.

That’s what copyright is actually about: ideas are free and flow freely, but it’s the fingerwork, the iteration of ideas in text, that gets copyrighted. The work done to encapsulate ideas on paper or onscreen.

It’s a load of slog. You spend hours and hours and come out with a coupla sheets of paper or a screenload of web-page. People loom at it and think, ‘Is that all?’.

If you’re writing a book it stays inside a computer for months, and no one sees it, and then suddely it comes out as a printed or audio book, and it’s almost like giving birth.

So this might be interesting and useful to a few listeners.
Recorded in October 2022 during a storm.

It’s here: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
and you can get it on Spotify, Google and Apple Podcasts too.