Melissa Lawrence

Hi everyone. Did you know that poetry is undergoing something of a revival? According to Susannah Herbert, Executive Director of National Poetry Day , one in 33 of all UK adults wrote at least one poem last year which amounts to about two million people writing poems, although presumably not all at the same time. That is nearly double the number that were writing poems in the 1990s. New platforms are emerging for poets faster than you can say “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, with the gate-keepers of the traditional publishing houses being sidelined in favour of internet groups, social media (especially Instagram apparently), cafes, You Tube, theatres, poetry slams and clubs. It seems that it has never been a better time to be a poet, so if you fancy joining the ranks of paper or performance poets, here are a few tips on writing poems that you might find useful. You don't need a publisher to be a poet 1.    Don’t feel you have to finish every poem that you start

Hi everyone. As I type this post, I'm gearing myself up for the heatwave which is due to hit the UK later today. It's going to be hotter here than in Las Vegas apparently, so I'd better start cashing in my chips. I thought I'd blog today about my recent return to reading writing magazines. For various reasons, I haven't been buying writing trade magazines for a few years now, even though I used to buy and read them, and even write for them sometimes, on a fairly regular basis. Although the number of writing magazines on general sale in the UK has dwindled considerably, there are still one or two good ones on the market and one of my favourites has always been Writers' Forum . This publication has been going for quite a number of years now and I was pleased to discover when I recently purchased a print copy that it is still a useful and informative publication for beginner and more experienced writers alike. One of my favourite writing magazines To

Hi everyone. What are you committed to in 2018? To be honest, this time last year, I thought I was going to be committed to psychiatric hospital, given how "off my head" I was feeling with the whole menopause malarkey. However, thanks to the wonders of HRT, things are a lot better this time round. My commitment for 2018 is to be a designer. I realise this might be a strange thing to say in a writing blog post as I should probably be saying that my commitment for 2018 is to be a better, richer, more productive or more frequently published writer. Actually, in a funny sort of way, I think I am saying all those things but not in the way you would expect. To cut a long story short, as my late father was fond of saying, I feel that I have been "faffing around" (to put it politely) with my designing career since I made the decision in September 2015 to change direction career-wise once again and become a designer. I thought it was lack of time, lack of confide