Firewords Podcast

Writing can be a very solitary activity and a lot of writers would prefer to keep it that way, but putting yourself out there and spreading the word about your work can be extremely rewarding. Self-promotion is often thought of as a dirty term and something that a lot of writers shy away from. However, it doesn’t always need to be about selling something and can really enrich your writing experience – even if you’ve never been published. In this episode, we look at some of the more rewarding kinds

With Issue 8 fresh off the press, we are excited to be publishing the winners of our visual prompt competition, run in partnership with Bloomsbury and Writers & Artists. Maggie Chiang, illustrator and past-contributor of Firewords, created a wonderful visual which we asked people to base a short story on. The response and results were amazing! To celebrate this, we’ve recorded a podcast that explains the reasons for our choice of winners and also delves into some other pieces which were submitted

In this week’s episode, we discuss different ways that you can use feedback – both from Firewords and other sources – to improve your writing on a continual basis. We also have three suggestions on where you can find this elusive feedback. A lot of people treat writing as a solitary activity, but putting your work out there and listening to what people think of it is so important. We want to encourage feedback from groups and individuals who touch your lives every day. There is a wealth of

Why is writing consistently so damn hard? Sometimes it feels like life is constantly trying to interfere with getting words on the page. In this episode, we outline of our own creative writing routine and show we are normal human beings; we struggle with building writing habits too. We do have some tips and techniques that work for us and they may help you write more consistently as well.

Is it possible to write to a theme effectively AND keep your unique writing voice? Hear some excerpts of writing we’ve published and find out why they work so well. We also discuss the pitfalls of trying to force your writing to fit a theme that doesn’t inspire you.

We take a look at the process of submitting your work to literary magazines. We received almost 900 pieces in our last call for submissions, and have noticed some points that keep cropping up. Some of our tips may help you streamline your process and succeed in getting published. We also answer some listener questions all about overused themes in writing – find out what they are!

In this first episode, we introduce ourselves, the Firewords project and what we have planned for this new creative writing podcast.