The Writers’ Gym Podcast

• Perfect Was Never On the Menu: Two Creative Writing Exercises

  If you’re listening to a podcast about writing, there’s a good chance you’ve experienced how a book you love has added to your life: how valuable that relationship with the words of a stranger, that tour of a world created by a mind other than your own, can be. Yet when it’s time to pay it forward, we can be blocked by questions like ‘What if it’s too weird?’ or ‘What if it’s too boring?’ In this episode, Rachel Knightley invites you to play Excuses Bingo, an original and favourite Writers’ Gym exercise, so you can move through fear and aim to be interested instead of interesting. The result? Paying it forward as a writer to your own readers.  

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• Think On The Page

  “But don’t you HAVE to wait for inspiration?” Every writing voice is unique — but how we stand in our way can be a lot less so. Inspired (see what we did there?) by a question Dr Rachel Knightley was asked in two workshops and one pub in the same week, this episode at the Writers’ Gym explores how to blend inspiration and perspiration to build healthy writing habits. We go back to Rachel’s key image of the writer’s artist palette: how our unique imagination, memory, observations and questions blend to even more unique results, when we create for ourselves (and with a little help from our writing workouts) the permission to use them.   Join our mailing list at drrachelknightley.substack.com or get in touch at [email protected]  

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• Why Normal Jobs Need Not Apply - Kim Newman

  Multi-award-winning author, journalist, film critic and fiction writer Kim Newman joins Dr Rachel Knightley at the Writers’ Gym for the final episode in our current series. Kim and Rachel talk about what a healthy and happy writing life can look like, the important relationship between freedom and structure, and how memory and imagination combine to build on our interests as authors into new works within the genres we love.     For a writing workout based on Kim’s interview with Rachel, scroll down or visit WritersGym.com to download every Writing Workout in the series.   Find out more about Gabrielle at https://johnnyalucard.com/biography/   Join our mailing list at drrachelknightley.substack.com or get in touch at [email protected]     Kim Newman’s Recipe For a Healthy Writing Life   Learn how to pace yourself.    Learn how to meet deadlines.   learn how to get stuff done.   Get stuff out of your head onto the page.   You have to engage people these days on the first page, that is absolutely true. But that's not the same as starting with a plane crash. But you have to have something there.   And work on the prose. I know it can be kind of tedious, but look at the shape of sentences. Don't repeat words too often.   Think hard about stuff like character names. It's difficult. Most people in their life have like one or two children they have to name. Authors have to name thousands of people over a career. So give some thought to that.   If you're writing historical fiction, learn what names were actually invented recently and you'll look an idiot if you put them in your medieval character called Vanessa or Pamela. Don't!   But also work out what names were popular in the 1940s if you're writing then. That's relatively easy to find out because now there are lists of what names were popular. But also think about your character's parents and whether they would pick a popular name. Maybe they wouldn't if they're strange or unconventional people or if they're in one of those families that likes to pass down embarrassing names to their children. think about where your characters come from, what shapes them before you get to the story, the adventure they're involved in.   Remember that other people have different obsessions to you or different habits to you. It's not so common now, but you used to be able to tell if an author was a smoker by the fact that all their characters puffed all the time. And I know that there are probably things that... In fact, as a non-driver, I know that I very rarely describe driving. But sometimes you sort of have to and I suspect there are howlers in that because it's not an experience I have.   That's the other thing, entertain yourself. If you don't do that nobody else is going to enjoy it either.

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• Confidence, Magic and Terry Pratchett – Gabrielle Kent joins the Writers' Gym

  Gabrielle Kent talks to Dr Rachel Knightley about the magic of the stories we inherit as well as those we create. Afull-time children's author who began her career as a graphic artist for video games and lecturer in games development. Gabrielle’s work includes Alfie Bloom - a series about a boy who inherits a castle and a whole load of magical problems, Knights and Bikes - a series based on the video game of the same name, and the Rani Reports series, featuring a girl who wants to be an investigative journalist and her adventures with her rambunctious Mauritian nani. As a lifelong Discworld fan, she was overjoyed to recently collaborate with Rhianna Pratchett and Paul Kidby on Tiffany Aching's Guide to being a Witch. She has just signed five books across two different series with a major publisher and is counting down the seconds until she can talk about them. She lives in the North East of England with her husband, daughter and agoraphobic cat.   For a writing workout based on Gabrielle’s interview with Rachel, scroll down or visit WritersGym.com to download every Writing Workout in the series.   Find out more about Gabrielle at https://gabriellekent.com   Join our mailing list at drrachelknightley.substack.com or get in touch at [email protected]     Writing Workout based on Gabrielle’s interview   Warm-up: Recycling first drafts   “If you tear it up, you can never do anything with it.” Gabrielle Kent   Instead of deleting ideas, making a ‘recycling’ folder. Maybe on your computer, maybe physical pieces of paper, maybe both. Treat everything that goes in it as a writing prompt for something new.   Exercise 1:  Future Editor   “Terry Pratchett always said writer's block doesn't exist and I realized after a while what he meant by that. There were times where I'd get stuck and things weren't happening. I didn't really have the inspiration, I'd just go away and I'd take ages before I went back to something. And then I realized what you do, you just don't stop writing. You trust yourself as a future editor.”   Future you, who’s finished your current work in progress, comes to visit you.   They tell you the book is finished, and it’s gone exactly where you wanted it to go when it was finished.   Now all you have to do is have the fun, and enjoy the journey.   Return to your work-in-progress.       Cool-down Exercise: Rachel’s Perfectionism/Procrastination Coin   Draw a circle on a piece of paper.   Write PERFECTIONISM in the middle.   Turn it over. Write PROCRASTINATION in the middle.   Keep it where you can see it, and spin it, when you’re tempted to stop trusting Future You by trying to make it perfect, or by stopping moving it forward.

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• Embracing the Strange – Aliya Whiteley joins the Writers' Gym

  Dr Rachel Knightley speaks to her Great British Horror 5 co-contributor, award-winning author of ovels, short stories and articles (“Usually strange ones”) Aliya Whiteley. is the author of seven books of speculative fiction, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlisted Skyward Inn and The Loosening Skin, and also The Beauty, which was shortlisted for both a Shirley Jackson award and the Otherwise Award. A tenth anniversary edition of The Beauty was published in 2024. She has written over one hundred published short stories that have appeared in magazines such as F&SF, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, The Dark, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and The Guardian, as well as in anthologies such as Unsung Stories’ 2084 and Lonely Planet’s Better than Fiction. Her non-fiction includes The Secret Life of Fungi, a look at how fungi are a permanent presence in her life. She also writes a regular non-fiction column on sci fi and fantasy matters for Interzone magazine. For a writing workout based on Aliya’s interview with Rachel, scroll down or visit WritersGym.com to download every Writing Workout in the series.   Find out more about Aliya at https://aliyawhiteley.uk/about/   Join our mailing list at drrachelknightley.substack.com or get in touch at [email protected]     Writing Workout based on Aliya’s interview   Warm-up: The Enormous Importance of Weird   Write down a list of your five weirdest interests or experiences.   Pick the one you’re least likely to write about.   Write about it for five minutes. Just for you.   Exercise 1: Fiction, Memoir and Truth   “I'm not an expert on fungi at all, but I wanted to write something about my fascination with them. and I tried, I did like a huge amount of research and was trying to put across things in a very dry academic kind of way… so instead I wrote this very short, personal book about how I just found fun everywhere throughout my life.”   Think about an experience doing something you love. Describe the sensations in your body, physical and emotional. Show us what you feel and discover. Write another version, in third person. Change the character’s gender, or location, or even their activity. Keep the emotional truth but change the literal truth.     Exercise 2: Remembering to Play     “I'm a big believer in all sorts of exercises and routines that you put around writing, it's a bit like scaffolding. It kind of takes the pressure off what it is you're trying to build. Something like working on 381, where every section of that book is 381 words long. That moves a lot of pressure of what's happening in the novel because you've applied sort of weird constraints to it.”   “Or exercises like, okay, so I have to put these five particular objects that I've just made up on the spot. They have to appear in this next short story somewhere. And then the narrative or the characters or all the other things that you would choose to worry about aren't there any longer because you're thinking about these five objects.”     Cool-down: Voices on the Bus   Choose one of Aliya’s favourites:   “All the voices that are in your head and you're all on the bus together. And the writer self is the one driving the bus. One of your passengers is shouting, but passengers are allowed to shout every now and again on my buses. That's okay. It doesn’t mean catastrophe ahead. t's a whole range of emotions and thoughts and processes and some, there are the ones that, you know, they're trying to warn you all the time, but you know, they're not driving the bus.” Aliya Whiteley   Who are the passengers on your bus?   What is each of them interested in?   Who’s really enthusiastic?   Who panics easily?   What does each one love?   What does each one want?

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