Category Archives: Creative writing

It is nearly done – one more blog to go

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“We are travellers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.” – Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

My year of daily blogging is nearly complete! I began on the 3rd of January 2023, so I plan to end on the 2nd of January 2024.

The whole process has been far more testing than I appreciated when I started. And not just for me. Often the writing has had to happen in the early hours, which has slipped the blogs into a new day, although I’ve still counted them as in, ticking them off one by one.

Now the journey – this little stage – is ending. It’s given me deadlines, and it’s given me courage. I’ve learned that there is time, and how to insist on it, even though finding it has often disrupted the daily patterns of others. To them I owe huge thanks for their patience, and likewise to those who kept on reading. I’ve so appreciated and needed the generosity of both groups, especially as all I can offer in return is a project that has felt not quite real, like painting on water. Perhaps 2024 will be the year I can turn my writing into something with a little more substance.

One more blog to go …

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2024

The daunting process of finding an agent

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This is the time of year when family used to wearily supply me with another copy of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, which I would then hunt through looking for likely targets. I’d read up on each agent’s specific requirements, and then measure out the ingredients to send to them. Sadly for me nothing baked into anything. So I gave up.

Then today I listened once more to writers discussing submissions, and I saw suddenly that the clue is in the word ‘submission’. That’s what it feels like after aching hours of drafting and tweaking, and rearranging according to each agent’s rules, especially if there’s not even a peep in response.

Anyway, while I sit here bleating like a sheep stuck on the wrong side of a fence, I think sometimes of J K Rowling. She created a whole world, then submitted it again and again, until finally ‘kapow‘! She succeeded because she did not give up. So, even if I can’t create a world as magnificent as hers, I can at least work on the not giving up … for now.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Where are stories from?

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“Tell me the facts and I’ll learn. Tell me the truth and I’ll believe. Tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.”

I’m not sure who said the words beneath the photograph above. I’ve seen them listed as a North American proverb, but can’t get closer to their origin than that.

Since finding the quotation, I’ve been thinking about it. I have an idea where facts are supposed to come from, and the truth. But stories? Perhaps children are the true gatekeepers of stories, happy always to follow them into the unknown, to escape along their paths into the land of make believe.

As adults do we lose that ability? I certainly seem to have less of it. It’s as though a muscle has wasted away, overwhelmed by the day to day and the every day. However, I’ve discovered that the camera finds stories. It slows life down. Catches it for a second and holds it there, like a challenge.

Take the photograph above. The fact is that I was photographing the birdlife on the Thames. The truth is that there was a man feeding the geese just out of sight of the camera. The story begins “once upon a time …”, and includes a bossy white gull, some obedient soldier geese, and a daring raid on the Tower to rescue a young river swan who the ravens want to make their king.

Who knows how it will end?

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023