What’s the difference between procrastination and a gentle ‘landing pattern’ on your way down to where the words are? If your bookshelves are noticeably neater when a deadline’s looming, it’s possible your rituals are becoming an end in themselves (procrastination) rather than a landing pattern: moving you towards your inner world. One of the best things to get the joy back? Stealthwriting. Dr Rachel Knightley — with a little help from the incomparable David Lynch reminding us to ‘go where the fish are’ — gets us back in touch with the importance of building space and time where the ideas can discover us.

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.

“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.

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