Emerging Writers Festival (2025)

Raeden Richardson | 12 September 2025

The sentence is the seed from which every narrative, character, and theme emerges. Dissecting the sentences of Garielle Lutz, Lucia Berlin and Lesley Nneka Arimah.

• Where do your stories begin? Where do you write from? What do you notice when reading? How do your favorite texts move forward?
• Chapter names hint at the story to come, the overarching structure. Underused intrigue.
• Think too hard about where to begin in your writing, and you'll never start at all.
• I write from a place I guess being desperate to create what doesn't exist. I need it to be written so I can read it, so I have to write it.
• If a story grabs you from the first paragraph, keep reading.
• Dreaming and writing run in parallel.
• Listening to music can often illuminate the writing urge. Associating a song with a piece gets you into that headspace.
• Stories find their life through plot, character, and language (story/poetry/consciousness.)
• In plot-heavy novels, language often takes a step back.
• Lean too heavily on the language, and a story reads like a fever dream, but often it's a little hard to parse.
• Most writers work through plot and character, using sentences as just a tool. An interesting way to write is start with the sentence, and see what you discover.
• Language as paint. Knowing both at the fundamental level are essential for an artist.
• The wording you use to tell a story is a powerful way to show how a character exists and sees the world.
• Mixing paints creates new colors and pigments, just as mixing words creates new ways of saying the same thing.
• When read aloud, sentences almost have a physical quality, and create embodied sensations.
• Call attention to the language you use to induce a physical feeling in the reader. Interrogate words as you use them.
• Speaking more than one language opens up your mother tongue for reflection and playfulness in your writing.
• Punctuation dictates cadence and atmosphere.
• What if you wrote as though the sentences were the characters? And nothing else mattered?
• The more the story focuses on the language, the more like poetry it becomes.
• I adore fever-dream-esque writing, but I feel in today's world it is forever derided and stamped out. Somehow text that's challenging is harder to convince people to read.
• Reverence for the word at the sub-atomic level.
• If you write for the sentence, you'll be loved a lot by few people, but if you write for the plot, you'll be loved a little by many people.
• Writing for audio abhors repetition, yet returning to phrases or moods or lines in writing serve as interesting structuring devices for a work.
• Think about the sonic effects the words you write use. What feelings do they evoke in the reader?
• Sentences themselves can make a story, built one syllable at a time. They also produce structure.
• Writing requires a liminal space, playfulness, and a feeling of freedom. How can you create that for yourself?
  • An interesting exercise: write but don't look. Turn your laptop screen's brightness down and see what you've created only later.
  • Another: have art form in your life you participate in for pure pleasure, not for skill-building. It'll remind you of why you started practicing the other.

13 September 2025 | Dominik Shields

Discover the challenges, rewards, and creative freedom that come with bringing your own work into the world independently. Practical guidance on drafting, editing, design, production and promotion.

• Self-publishing opens up new avenues and possibilities, for you, the genre, and the culture at large.
• Traditional publishing has higher stakes and more pressure on everyone in the industry. It's also highly dependent on what's trending, what's popular, and what the editors are interested in.
• Self-publishing also uses print-on-demand services, which means it's more cost-effective, more convenient, more flexibility, and is more environmentally conscious.
• Self-publishing is infinitely cheaper, because you can decide what costs you take on and what you forgo.
• If you have the resources, spend the money on outsourcing the things you're not good at, to then spend the time you would've spent on them doing the things only you can.
• YouTube is always your friend. Whenever you're not sure of how to do something, research it!
• Register your books with the Australian Copyright Agency: they then track purchases of your books from universities, libraries, schools, and other institutions and send you a royalty once a year.
• Social media can be a weapon but if you use it smartly, it's an excellent method for getting the word out.
• Cold-email everyone you can think of when promoting your book to see who might buy it: bookstores, libraries, record stores, gift shops... Make it personable, personalized, and interesting. Showcase your unique personality and humanity. They want to sell things that'll excite them and their customers.
• Bookstores sell your books on consignment, meaning you get a commission after they sell it after buying it from you at a discount price, and return the ones they don't sell. Learning invoicing, and pricing your books with a markup so you make a profit is a must.
• Adore and champion your work, because that enthusiasm builds and rubs off on other people. Confidence is more marketable than shyness.
• Leave your books and printed material around in public spaces and see what happens for others to read.
• Print out posters with a QR Code that links to a page with all places where someone can buy it and put them up.
• Email folks who work at magazines and other print-based publications and see if they'd be willing to promote your work or collaborate. Email friends and investigate mutual connections.
• People who read your first book who like it often recommend your further books, so keep in contact with them.
• Determine your book's Dewey Decimal classification and use that when talking to your books to people who work in the industry.
• Make a book launch collaborative: build connections, sell more works, and draw the attention of others.

13 September 2025 | Irma Gold

Learn about a novel's structure and sequencing from an award-winning author and editor. Get started on a basic framework for your book.

• Around only ~1% of books submitted to traditional publishes make it to print.
• Plot, boiled down to its essence, is several characters under stress.
  • Think about how important it it to your genre, and ensure it fits with expectations.
  • Three act structure: setup (act 1), confrontation (act 2), resolution (act 3)
• When writing to capture the reader's attention:
  • Where does your story begin? Make them a unique offer. Convey a sense of tension and immediacy, as if the story has already begun. See the character facing a decision, a challenge, or an obstacle.
  • Avoid these opening scenes: the protagonist sitting alone, waking up, in transit, or a dream sequence. These are all static and create situations where telling takes precedence. Putting them in motion shows the character.
  • Your protagonist doesn't have to be likable or sympathetic, but they need to be compelling.
  • Every story needs an inciting incident: which introduces the 'dramatic question' which the plot resolves or answers. This is what compels the reader to keep with the book.
  • When editing, every single word in your book needs to contribute to answering the dramatic question. If it doesn't, cut it out.
  • Never begin with backstory. It's an excellent way to figure out why you're telling the story and what caused the characters to be where they are, but this isn't the novel. Weave backstory, only if necessary, into the plot.
  • Believing a reader requires backstory to understand a story isn't helpful. Context is necessary, yes, but you'd be surprised how much you can trust your reader to fill in the details.
  • What matters in a story is what happens right now, not 'then.' How the character changes through the story is more important than who they used to be.
  • The tension, or dramatic irony, comes from the gap between what the reader knows and what they don't know.
  • Try cutting everything from the beginning to get to the most important event and weave through the essential information through the rest of the story. It's almost always an improvement.
• The middle is almost always the hardest to write. It risks meandering, but it needs to be windy, with constant setbacks and roadblocks.
  • In the middle, you need to really push your characters. Introduce conflict and chaos, threaten their identity, have them make mistakes, and show their vulnerability.
  • Conflict holds curiosity and drives every fictional story.
  • Figure out what your character really wants, and deny them that right until the end. They still need to have the occasional win, otherwise it risks being too full of drudgery.
  • Small wins in the context of larger losses brings catharsis, structure, and sustained interest. Otherwise, the reader might lose hope or get taken out of the story.
  • Subplots deepen the narrative and pad out the middle, but don't let them take control. At their best, they strength and complement the main plot.
  • Answer questions your readers have one at a time, drawn-out over the narrative to keep them turning the pages. Timing is everything.
• The ending has an climax, has an emotional payoff, which answers the dramatic question, changes the character in some way, and ties up the loose ends.
  • The resolution shows the reaction to the climax, and gives the reader an emotional impact. You want the reader to be thinking about your book for days afterwards, which drives word-of-mouth recommendations and encourages them to read your next book.
  • Poor endings are implausible, out of context, unearned, a genre switch, anticlimactic, comes out of left field, too rushed, cliched, or out-of-character.
  • If you want an ending to ambiguous, you can, but you need to ensure it's still satisfying, and appropriate for the genre you're writing.
• Everything you introduce in the story has to be plausible, and be built towards in previous chapters.
• Be intentional about point of view. Which one would best suit the story? And the sooner you figure it out, the better.
  • You need to always stick to your chosen point of view, otherwise it becomes jarring. You can have a book with multiple points of view, but need to have a specific, sensical method for switching.
  • If you tell the reader everything, there's no subtext, therefore, no life.
• With every writing rule, guideline, or suggestion, there are always exceptions. But still, really think about whether your work is an exception.

16 September 2025 | Em Readman

Learn how to craft timely, relevant, and high-quality opinion pieces on culture, politics and media that are often turned around in just 24–48 hours. Discover how to craft a strong angle, pitch to the right publisher, and write with impact and urgency.

• What makes a good opinion piece? Timely, well-positioned, has a unique angle, and emphasizes the larger concept/movement/themes over the specifics of the moment.
• Whenever something captures your attention, it might make for an interesting opinion piece. What's your take? How does it factor into a larger movement or concept? How can you connect all three parts into a cohesive narrative?
• Speed is of the essence, but as important is [note incomplete in original]
• When choosing topics, think about what your bases are? What do you care a lot about, know much about, learn about, and are relevant to you? What do you read about? What themes come up in your art or interests? What do you wish people would talk more about? What unique insight could you offer? What aspects of your identity would you consider yourself knowledgeable in? What do your friends ask you questions about?
  • Have no more than five core bases, three are best. Bonus points if they intersect meaningfully.
• Pay attention to others writing in the spaces you wish to inhabit. Ensure your work contributes to the larger conversation.
• An op-ed publication process: spot something of interest, brainstorm angles, determine the piece's takeaway, ask some clarifying questions to narrow in further, pitch at the same time as writing (to ensure the best chance at timeliness), find research and experts for quotes to increase the piece's authority, make edits as required, prepare for publication and promotion, and repeat!
• Locking in the core message of anything you write is necessary before you begin. This guides your work and ensures it resonates.
• Before you start writing an opinion piece, figure out what that is. Write down everything on the topic you can think of so you can see patterns, weak spots, and ideas. Then review. Decide what you want to talk about and what you don't want to. Also, narrow down into one sentence what the piece's takeaway is.
• Your second thoughts on any topic are almost always better than your visceral reactions.
• Attach an evergreen opinion to a current piece of news.
• Even opinion pieces need sources, links, or quotes to ensure their relevancy and legitimacy. Contact experts for legitimacy, and everyday citizens for relevancy.
• To find sources, use books, scholarly articles, other essays, and reports.
• For any facts you introduce in an op-ed, always reference a source.
• To avoid an unconsidered-take, ask yourself: who's perspective is missing, what don't I know, am I blaming someone or something for the problem, and is the focus on the movement instead of the moment?
• Avoid shaming or blaming people in opinion pieces. Otherwise, it creates unnecessary discourse and negative feelings, stops people from seeing the larger perspective, and banishes nuance to its detriment.
• Be humble and always willing to learn. You aren't always right.
• When choosing who to pitch for articles where time is of the essence: has a value/topic alignment, able to publish quickly, accepts essays and editorials on a regular basis, accepts guest contributors, and is accessible to your target audience. Ideally, you also read/follow/subscribe to their publication.
• When pitching: follow the guidelines exactly, and convince them of why them/now/you, be polite and kind. Why are you a relevant person? What can you offer? Mention any bylines you have. Submit earlier in the week so they have time to respond. Only pitch one piece to one publication at a time.
• Don't ever pitch or submit a piece if you don't have time to finish it, edit it, or respond to their emails.
• Ask yourself: how will your piece age, does it remind people of the 'inciting incident', and will it still be useful/relevant in a year from now?
• Always keep practicing your writing. Work quickly to increase your speed and quality.
• If your piece gets rejected constantly, you could turn it into a piece that isn't so timely, or is more longform and re-pitch it.
• When asking for quotes for an article, be respectful, concise, make them aware of any time constraints, and emphasize how it won't take too much of their time. Be transparent about what angle and intention for the piece, and offer to send it to them after it's published. Be willing to be flexible in how you receive their quotes.

13 September 2025 | Tzeyi Koay, Joseph Earp, Faisal Oddang

Accomplished writers share candid insights on staying resilient in the face of rejection, keeping creative momentum alive, and cultivating bravery and morale throughout the process.

• A true writer is someone who stills writes even if they get rejected a thousand times over, even if no one else reads their work.
• Rejections aren't a massive, one-time letdown: more like death by a thousand cuts, but only if you let it. See each as progress instead of a setback.
  • They can also be a chance to re-examine your words, ideas, and concepts, and re-work them.
• Keep going. Always keep going. One achievement can be the door that opens all the others.
• You can work in a writing-related field, or outside it, but you still need to do so. Yet it's a catch-22, because a non-writing job leaves you time poor, but a writing job may leave you word poor.
• Your first book may not necessarily bad, but it might not be your most honest, which is where your most powerful work lies.
• 90% of folks believe they have a book in them, yet 1% only achieve that goal. This might be because the first draft isn't the hardest part, but taking feedback, and polishing it without letting your soul get destroyed is.
  • The publishing isn't in the drafting, it's in the revisions.
  • Anticipating the incoming feedback is so much worse than actually receiving it. The sooner you realize that, the better.
  • There's never room for arrogance.
  • Receiving criticism is a skill you can cultivate. It becomes less painful.
• Spite or oppositional thinking is often a core motivation when you're starting, or when you're young. Yet the older you get, the less attached you become the outcomes, and that's a blessing.
• No writing is ever wasted. No work is ever dead. Even if a piece never sees an audience, you can use it for inspiration for future work, for parts, or just as practice for building your skills.
• Write what you'd want to read. Your audience will know when you're having to force the words out.
• Creating a longform manuscript takes such a long time. So much so, you risk forgetting why you started. Do whatever you can to remember.
• Allow yourself to write terribly, especially for the first draft. Trust your future self to tease out a polished manuscript later.
• Planning helps you stay organized and makes sense of things, yet too much of a good thing leaves your words lifeless.
• If you measure your worth on accolades you achieve, you'll be on a fruitless chase for the rest of your life.
• Find your community as soon as you can. Commiserate, communicate, collaborate, and find solace.
• Writing is always worthwhile, and there will always be people who find value in your work, no matter how the industry changes. It takes years to become a success overnight.
• Wanting to become an artist may seem frivolous, but even if there's no reason whatsoever to be hopeful, still hold on to hope against hope.
• If you don't show up on a consistent basis, your story won't either. The work wants to be written.
• Make the writing process fun, collaborative, or both. It doesn't have to be miserable and lonely.
• Draft in snippets, rather than full sentences. If you can't think of the specific details, sketch them out, and move on. You can add them in later.
• Finding writing communities:
  • Go to author talks and book launches to meet other writers.
  • Join author street teams or ARC reader teams.
  • Find groups on Discord or Reddit.
  • Email or message writers unprompted and introduce yourself.
  • Even if you can't find a community, it can be the authors you read, or the writers you admire you consult in your head. How would they respond to your work or what you're struggling with.

13 September 2025 | Miranda Darling, Andrew Sutherland, Shokoofeh Azar

Multi-genre authors discuss their work and writing process, offering valuable insight and fresh perspectives for those who want to try their hand at writing across genres.

• Magical realism, or any genre for that matter, is a way of looking at the world, a certain lens through which to tell a story. It gives you a framework to write in a way you wouldn't otherwise.
  • Magical realism gives you countless layers to examine, and the space to deal with all the complex nuance of the world.
• Writing across genre helps you resist hegemonic thinking.
• When choosing a form or subject to write in, think: how can it serve the work? How can it bring it to life?
• Genre helps you establish trust and expectations in the reader. It keeps the reader's dignity and respects their time.
• Writing across subjects, not 'staying in your lane', helps you stay playful, invigorated, and curious. It gives you freedom, and the chance to ask questions in your writing you wouldn't get to otherwise.
• Lived experiences or philosophies or autobiographical elements filter into every work you create, if you're intentional about genre and how these intersect, it creates more interesting or reflective work.
• Realism sometimes isn't enough to be able to tell the stories you need to.
• Every genre you write in influences the future works you create. Thinking about this creates a richer experience.
• Figure out your work's emotional temperature and atmosphere and choose a genre that'll amplify that.
• Record all ideas you come up with. No matter what, no matter where. You never know what might happen.
  • Keep a journal. Things can grow out of your musings.
  • Fragments, phrases, and words are the building blocks, so note down any which capture your attention. How can you recreate, build upon them, or write new work with them?
• Think of your stories in layers: plot, social commentary, reflections, character, themes, language, etc. How do they talk to each other within the work?
• Be brutal when editing your work, but gentle with yourself. Remove everything you don't need to let what's left sing.
• Rhythm is structure, structure is rhythm. Prose has to ring right.
• Any time you're at a loss for a word in a paragraph you're writing, leave it for now. It'll come to you.
• Treat your writing as a professional, take it seriously. Give it, and yourself, the respect and integrity it deserves.
• Filter feed through the literary universe to receive writerly inspiration. Don't narrow your focus too soon, or really, ever.
• Look at yourself and your writing through a magnified telescope from the moon: distance and closeness. It gives you a more nuanced perspective.
• Even when writing something as intimate as confessional poetry, some things you can keep to yourself. The poems are for you as much as an audience.
• Even the wildest of stories, the most fantastical of worlds, is forever heightened by bringing in facts.
• Literature is a way of presenting truths when larger societies are punitive or narrow-minded.
• Experiment and play with genre, but create the rules and reader expectations through structure, and stick within those.
• Establishing your tendencies as a cross-genre writer with your audience is an excellent idea. The sooner the better.
• Your audience will always be fragmented, and that's okay.
• Make your decision: who are you writing for? Your audience or yourself?
• Being a magpie artist: collecting lots of interesting things, and being distracted by shiny things.
  • It's also an excellent survival strategy, financially and mentally.
• When choosing form, think about the scale of your work. Who and how many are you trying to reach? Realistically? Set your expectations.
• Be accountable to your ideas and principles. Learn and grow. Staying true, having integrity and dignity, is far more important than a facade of consistency.
• Genres are a useful method of categorization, but nothing more. It is up to the author to categorize themselves, and how the reader sees the work says something about them.
• Audiobooks as a form of oral storytelling.

14 September 2025 | Alice Griffin, Gemma Bird Matheson, Max Easton, Madeleine Ryan

Multi-disciplinaries speak to the emotional rollercoaster of living a creative life: the constant balancing act of sustaining both art and everyday responsibilities. Discover how to navigate the noise and make meaningful time for one's practice—even when life pulls in every direction.

• Creative chaos: traversing the known and unknown.
• Being creative means making a new world, often by necessity. What doesn't yet exist.
• Creative works bring connection, fills gaps that need filling, brings meaning where there would otherwise be none.
• If you can't do it alone, patchwork together your creative influences and see what happens.
• Approaching themes you're wrestling with your life in your work is almost therapeutic.
• If you can't stop thinking about something, then that's a good sign to make stuff around it.
• Feeling the world is overwhelming, yet almost necessary for creating things.
• Be discerning about who's criticism you take on and how you think about it. It's not about who's right, it's about what's right.
• Taking feedback well takes trust, respect, vulnerability, and a calm atmosphere.
• You can never take anything personally when working in the creative industries. Flexibility and thinking on your feet are also a necessity.
• If an early reader of a written work isn't getting or understanding what you're trying to get across, that doesn't always mean it has to be removed. Perhaps it just needs to be reworked.
• Negative feedback isn't always 'bad', because sometimes it's an opportunity to learn.
• When facing rejection, you have to remember it's not about you or the people or the industry or the publication, it's often not the right place at the right time. Remember why you're doing this.
• It's the work that matters, not the publishing.
• Rejection in the creative industry is constant, so it's crucial to have a life outside it to weather the harder things in your work.
• If you feel strongly about something, others will too. Trust your gut and your enthusiasm, and do everything you can to give your work the best chance it can have.
• Always keep trying. People say no for countless reasons, not necessarily because of you/your work. Take yourself out of it.
• Success in the traditional path almost always means compromise.
• When submitting things, there are often long waiting times. 'Distracting' yourself with other projects is reliving and also fulfilling. However, quiet times are also necessary for creative rest and reflection. Take the periods of your life as they are and trust the cycles.
• When what you love as a hobby or in art is something you do in work, turning that side of your brain off takes practice, but sometimes it's not even worth trying, because you can just note any ideas and come back to them later.
• Noise is a detriment to clear thinking. Have periods where you remove all distractions.
• Whiteboarding or writing everything out banish circular thinking and make everything clearer.
• Being too invested in the outcome makes the process more difficult. To fall in love with the making helps keep you going for the long-term.
• Celebrating your successes or achievements gives you motivation to keep going. Even if you don't celebrate it, reflecting on it is still important, because otherwise you don't appreciate it.
• Talking with others about your creative works is often a careful deliberation between not constantly minimizing yourself and respecting others may not have a vested interest.
• Having enough financial stability and enough energy to make your creative things is a constant balancing act, and the former often has to take precedence over the later.
• Don't let getting paid to do something take your enthusiasm away.
• Discipline and future-thinking is necessary for looking after yourself because success and failure comes and goes in waves.
• The boring things are often the most important to maintain for a healthy existence.
• Exist in the world, not just in your head.
• When you're avoiding the writing, action begets motivation. Take the seriousness out of it (write it in your notes app, on scraps of paper) and tell yourself you only have to do it for ten minutes. Consume things that inspire you, or motivate you to create something better.
• Sleeping on it always gives you a more nuanced perspective.
• When promoting something, focus on being passionate about the thing itself, ignore yourself. Also don't spread yourself too thin.
• It's okay if a creative project isn't working and you put it aside. You can always return to it.
• Every piece of praise or positive feedback is a lifeline to return to when you feel like giving up. Hold on to them for times of need.

14 September 2025 | Suzy Garcia, Grace Heifetz, Marilyn Miller, Marina Sano

Booksellers, publishers, editors and agents discuss the current literary landscape. Practical advice, observations and insights, along with predictions and hopes for the future of this industry.

• Promoting book culture when there are so many other entertainment options is a difficult, yet worthy endeavor.
• Everything we can do to lift the diversity of literature is worth it.
• The industry is forever becoming more fragmented, which isn't such a bad thing. There's more opportunities than ever.
• Publishing is easier than ever, but marketing is becoming more important, and harder. Thinking creatively and always learning and trying new things is the only way to survive.
• Saturation is seemingly an increasing concern, but the book industry has been saturated for a long time. To stand out, you have to focus on quality and an excellent experience for your readers more than ever.
• Building a community around your work is one of the most important things for maintaining interest in what you do.
• Curation, done well, is highly valuable for consumers.
• Handselling books are a valuable experience for building trust in your customers and figuring out what people like. In a world of infinite scale, do things that don't.
• Publishing is facing a paradox, a constant shrinking of companies and outlets, yet infinitely more content.
• Branding and consistency and presenting your readers with a reliable experience keeps them coming back.
• The one thing you can't give your readers or ask more of your readers is their time. People are busier than ever, so offering different formats (audio, shorter works, collections.)
• Media is more individualized so people aren't having as many common experiences. More book clubs are popping up to fill that need.
• Escapism is becoming increasingly popular, and people really want to be transported to another place. That doesn't necessarily mean 'cozy' fiction, it just has to be different from reality. Fiction is also becoming a way for people to process their feelings around themes and pressing issues.
• Non-Fiction has also become less viable and popular in traditional publishing, especially from newer authors. Podcasts are taking up that space that used to be filled by non-fiction pieces, however true crime books are bigger than ever.
• We have a responsibility to remove barriers to publishing and writing, but sometimes it's also a matter of space, time, energy and resources.
• You don't have to have direct experience in something or understand it fully to appreciate or enjoy it. Things don't have to be relatable, either.
• Vote with your feet. Support what you love to keep it going, or create it if it doesn't exist yet. You have the power.
• Humor is underused in contemporary writing. It disarms, teaches, and makes an idiosyncratic, unique voice.
• Support the local library. Borrow books, get a card! Support your local bookstore.