Category: Creative Writing

Business writing Creative Writing
14 August 2023

Getting the best out of ChatGPT

By Eran Malloch 14th August 2023 How to get a great article out of ChatGPT I see a lot of people struggling to get high quality content (articles, blog posts, etc.) out of ChatGPT. In most cases, it’s because you are not giving it better guidelines to help write your content. Most people just instruct it with something simple like: Write me a blog post […]

Creative Writing
22 July 2023

Wanting to discover who we will become

“As we live our lives, we find ourselves confronted with a brute fact about how little we can know about our futures—just when it is most important to us that we do know. For many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we’ve done it, and we change ourselves in the process of doing it. I’ll argue that, in the […]

Creative Writing
4 June 2023

Week 13: The joke

Person 1: “I say, I say, I say, what is the secret to successful comedy?” Person 2: “I don’t know, what IS the secret to successful co-“ Person 1, interrupting Person 2: “Timing” Comedy, as with most of life, is a subjective thing. I love the tv show ‘Lucifer’, yet some staunch Southern American Christians on my Facebook feed patently don’t and have told me […]

Creative Writing
28 May 2023

Week 12: Australiana, you’re soaking in it

Strine: A wonderfully colourful way of enhancing any communication with a ‘touch of Aussie’. When I first moved to Australia, as a 10 year old, I naturally knew no ‘Aussie’. Sure, we supposedly spoke the same language, English, but there were so many parts of the Aussie sentence that completely baffled me. This was understandable, and equivalent to foreigners—even those with a good grasp of […]

Creative Writing
21 May 2023

Week 11: The rise of the bots, AI and misinformation

The growth of misinformation perpetrated by ‘bad actors’ is a real and present danger. Whilst Twitter has long been known as a hive of bots (and thus distrusted for years), lately Insta, Facebook, YouTube and even TikTok have witnessed the infiltration of anonymous accounts pushing far-right agendas and ideology. With the growth in the ability of technology to mimic and be mistaken for ‘real’ people, […]

Creative Writing
15 May 2023

Week 10: Tropes (or ‘The cowboy punched the cow while his wife, dressed in her gingham shirt and gingham apron, watched on with a pot of coffee in her hand’)

For a gumshoe, he was dark, brooding and dangerous. His clients, mostly women wanting to catch their husbands cheating on them so they could get the house, were drawn to him like a moth to a flame—a blowtorch of a flame. Their inhibitions disappeared under his flaming sexuality and many women felt stirrings under their skirts and dresses that they hadn’t felt in a long […]

Creative Writing
15 May 2023

Week 9: Fear

I’m scared to write this… Lol. I’ve never written in a style that includes fear. Coming from academic and business writing backgrounds, the use of fear is usually not present. Factuality and optimism (aka ‘spin’) have been my stock in trade. I can see how the use of fear could be a great motivator if done well; equally, I can see the use of fear […]

Creative Writing
15 May 2023

Week 8: Power Writing (and writing short and sweet from Week 7)

Can I write succinctly and let the power of my words and sentences transport the reader to where I want them to be and think what I want them to think? I don’t think so. I find it very hard to turn a long piece of writing into something short, I am always wanting to explain further, to show yet one more example, to …well, […]

Creative Writing
15 May 2023

Week 7: Writing something other than a cybercrime novel (badly)

A guest lecture with David Waters from Green Hill Publishing made me realise that there are other avenues I can pursue as a part-time writer of bad cyber-crime novels. According to Pete, there are very few buyers of novels in Australia, but far more buyers of self-help and autobiographies/memoirs. Here’s some of my thoughts on what else I can do, right now… In fact, I […]

Creative Writing
15 May 2023

Week 6: The Adelaide Show podcast

My latest assignment is to create a marketing campaign for a podcast. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Ten years ago I would be able to put together a campaign in my sleep. But not for this particular podcast,, not now. The Adelaide Show is a long-running podcast and labour of love for its creator, Steve Davis. Steve, a highly experienced and well-qualified professional […]