S.C Newland - Writer

Today celebrates the birth of J.R.R. Tolkien, famous for writing The Hobbit. He began it almost accidentally after scribbling “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” on a student paper in the early 1930s. It took several years of work as he shaped the Middle-earth world. The style is warm, archaic, and audience‑centred, inviting readers to imagine alongside him. He used a past‑tense, storyteller’s voice with occasional first‑person intrusions from an implied narrator. It was published in 1937. He wrote it partly for his children and partly from his love of language, legend, and you could say world discovery. Picture AI generation

Here’s to another twelve months of chasing sentences, wrestling with commas, and finding inspiration in unexpected places. May your drafts surprise you, your characters challenge you, and your stories lead you somewhere you didn’t know you needed to go. Now where's that coffee... Cheers

Merry Christmas to Writers everywhere :-)

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens was first published on this day, 19th December, 1843. It follows Ebenezer Scrooge, a miser who despises Christmas and human warmth. On Christmas Eve, he is visited by the ghost of his dead partner, Jacob Marley, who warns him to change. Three spirits then guide Scrooge through his past, present, and possible future, revealing the consequences of his greed and the humanity he has long denied. Witnessing joy, hardship, and his own lonely fate, Scrooge undergoes a profound transformation. By Christmas morning, he embraces generosity, compassion, and community, becoming a symbol of redemption and renewed hope. His Writing Process  Manuscripts show Dickens worked with meticulous care , revising heavily to shape a tightly structured narrative. He wrote A Christmas Carol as a novella quickly in late 1843, driven by both creative urgency and financial pressure. The structure, five “staves” instead of chapters, mirrors a piece of music, reinforcing th...

  A statue of the English writer, poet and musicologist  Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978)  was unveiled in Dorchester, Dorset, on Sunday, 14th December.  Her work blended wit, subversion, and a quietly radical imagination. She is often celebrated as a feminist and queer literary figure , though she herself resisted labels. Her debut novel,  Lolly Willowes (1926) became a sensation. It follows a woman who escapes her suffocating family to become a witch—an early, slyly feminist narrative about autonomy and refusal. Warner wrote novels, poetry, biographies, translations, and over 140 stories for The New Yorker . Her fiction often blends the domestic with the uncanny, the political with the intimate. Significant works include:  The Corner That Held Them  (1948),   Kingdoms of Elfin  (1977). Numerous short stories, many now considered modern classics. A committed leftist, Warner was active in anti-fascist movements and wrote with ...

  In-Between Dartmoor is on the shelves in Tavistock library! How exciting is that? A wonderful Christmas present to see the anthology written by Tavistock Writers Independent Group -TWIG -  catalogued under LITERARY. There we are, sitting beside the greats: George Orwell, Billy Connolly and Dawn French ;-)