The Writers’ Gym Podcast

Embracing the Strange – Aliya Whiteley joins the Writers' Gym

Dr Rachel Knightley speaks to her Great British Horror 5 co-contributor, award-winning author of ovels, short stories and articles (“Usually strange ones”) Aliya Whiteley. is the author of seven books of speculative fiction, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlisted Skyward Inn and The Loosening Skin, and also The Beauty, which was shortlisted for both a Shirley Jackson award and the Otherwise Award. A tenth anniversary edition of The Beauty was published in 2024. She has written over one hundred published short stories that have appeared in magazines such as F&SF, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, The Dark, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and The Guardian, as well as in anthologies such as Unsung Stories’ 2084 and Lonely Planet’s Better than Fiction. Her non-fiction includes The Secret Life of Fungi, a look at how fungi are a permanent presence in her life. She also writes a regular non-fiction column on sci fi and fantasy matters for Interzone magazine.
For a writing workout based on Aliya’s interview with Rachel, scroll down or visit WritersGym.com to download every Writing Workout in the series.
 
Find out more about Aliya at https://aliyawhiteley.uk/about/
 
Join our mailing list at drrachelknightley.substack.com or get in touch at thewritersgym@rachelknightley.com
 
 
Writing Workout based on Aliya’s interview
 
Warm-up: The Enormous Importance of Weird
 
Write down a list of your five weirdest interests or experiences.
 
Pick the one you’re least likely to write about.
 
Write about it for five minutes. Just for you.
 
Exercise 1: Fiction, Memoir and Truth
 
“I'm not an expert on fungi at all, but I wanted to write something about my fascination with them. and I tried, I did like a huge amount of research and was trying to put across things in a very dry academic kind of way… so instead I wrote this very short, personal book about how I just found fun everywhere throughout my life.”
 
Think about an experience doing something you love. Describe the sensations in your body, physical and emotional. Show us what you feel and discover.
Write another version, in third person. Change the character’s gender, or location, or even their activity. Keep the emotional truth but change the literal truth.
 
 
Exercise 2: Remembering to Play
 
 
“I'm a big believer in all sorts of exercises and routines that you put around writing, it's a bit like scaffolding. It kind of takes the pressure off what it is you're trying to build. Something like working on 381, where every section of that book is 381 words long. That moves a lot of pressure of what's happening in the novel because you've applied sort of weird constraints to it.”
 
“Or exercises like, okay, so I have to put these five particular objects that I've just made up on the spot. They have to appear in this next short story somewhere. And then the narrative or the characters or all the other things that you would choose to worry about aren't there any longer because you're thinking about these five objects.”
 
 
Cool-down: Voices on the Bus
 
Choose one of Aliya’s favourites:
 
“All the voices that are in your head and you're all on the bus together. And the writer self is the one driving the bus. One of your passengers is shouting, but passengers are allowed to shout every now and again on my buses. That's okay. It doesn’t mean catastrophe ahead. t's a whole range of emotions and thoughts and processes and some, there are the ones that, you know, they're trying to warn you all the time, but you know, they're not driving the bus.” Aliya Whiteley
 
Who are the passengers on your bus?
 
What is each of them interested in?
 
Who’s really enthusiastic?
 
Who panics easily?
 
What does each one love?
 
What does each one want?

Eyebrows and Imagination – Rosie Garland joins the Writers' Gym

Award-winning poet, long and short fiction author, performer and vocalist with the March Violets, Rosie Garland talks to Dr Rachel Knightley about curiosity, creative confidence – and taking on the world eyebrows first! She is the author of The Palace of Curiosities (which won the Mslexia Novel Competition and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize), Vixen and The Night Brother, which was described by The Times as “a delight…with shades of Angela Carter.” Her new novel, The Fates (Quercus) is a retelling of the Greek myth of the Fates. Her latest poetry collection, What Girls do in the Dark (Nine Arches Press), was shortlisted for the 2021 Polari Prize. Val McDermid has named her one of the most compelling LGBT+ writers in the UK today. In 2018-2019 she was inaugural Writer-in-Residence at The John Rylands Library, Manchester, and in 2023 was made a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.
 
 
For a writing workout based on Rosie’s interview with Rachel, scroll down or visit WritersGym.com to download every Writing Workout in the series.
 
Find out more about Rosie at http://www.rosiegarland.com
 
Join our mailing list at drrachelknightley.substack.com or get in touch at thewritersgym@rachelknightley.com
 
 
Writing Workout based on Rosie’s interview
 
Warm-up: Rachel’s ‘Excuses Bingo’ Grid
 
Make a massive noughts and crosses board on your page. Each square just needs to be to be big enough to write a sentence in. Throw all of the phrases that come up: ‘What if it’s too boring?’ ‘What if it’s too weird?’ ‘I’m not that kind of writer.” ‘X is better than me.’ Whatever your brain might throw at you.
 
Go through them all, and use ‘What if’ to find the positive opposite (spoiler alert: it’s going to be true!). For example, ‘What if it's too weird?’ might have as its positive opposite ‘What if this is the book that saved somebody's life?’
 
Exercise 1: The Craft of Gentleness
 
“I strive to do is show myself the gentleness that I show to other writers. I mean one thing I absolutely love and which feeds and nourishes me is being a mentor for other writers. I come to mentoring with an attitude of acceptance and warm encouragement and cheerleading and something I try to do for myself. It’s sometimes a struggle because of that classic one of like the hardest, the person who's hardest in the world is you on yourself.” Rosie Garland
 
Listening
Choose to listen to when the voices of self-criticism come:
 
If there is a fear, what would it be? If the thing it’s criticising represents a step forward, what if that voice needs your reassurance instead of obeying it?
 
Choosing
 
Now you know it isn’t a fact, put the what the voice on your Excuses Bingo grid. Note the time reference (you might just find it flies past the window the same time tomorrow!).
 
Exercise 2: The Art of Randomness
 
“Go and pick up three random books, four if you're feeling particularly adventurous. They could be recipe books, How to Fix Your Chainsaw or the novels of Jane Austen. Take the three books, open them up at a random page. Pick a random line: close your eyes, stick a finger in and basically with all three books pick out about between three and five random phrases, write them down and then use them as springboards for writing anything and try to get all five in.”
Rosie Garland
 
 
Cool-down Exercise: Be Surprised
“The thing about giving yourself permission to, you know, throw it all away when you've done it. was literally just, was exercising the writing muscles. Again, one of the reasons I do writing in the morning, apart from the fact I'm a morning person and I know not everyone else is, is it is like going to the gym. A… writer's gym? I see what I did there. Who would have thought?” Rosie Garland
 
If there was one new creative habit you could bring into this week, what would it be?

JD Barker's Writing Life

This week at the Writers’ Gym, Dr Rachel Knightley is joined by New York Times and international bestselling thriller writer JD Barker. His work has been broadly described as suspense thrillers, often incorporating elements of horror, crime, mystery, science fiction and the supernatural. He is a frequent collaborator with James Patterson. JD shares the creative exercises and habits that support his writing life and how valuing every contact he made in his early career meant building the creative career he has today.
 
For a writing workout based on JD’s interview with Rachel, scroll down or visit WritersGym.com to download every Writing Workout in the series.
 
Find out more about JD at https://jdbarker.com
 
Join our mailing list at drrachelknightley.substack.com or get in touch at thewritersgym@rachelknightley.com
 
 
Writing Workout based on JD’s interview
 
Warm-up: Creative Stretch
 
“I turn off the Internet when I first start and I don't turn it on until I get my daily word count done… which I'm usually done with by about ten, ten thirty. Then I flip that switch on the internet all the emails start coming in So basically the business side of this that I have to deal with…until three o'clock in the afternoon That's what my quitting bell rings.” JD Barker
 
Take a pen and treat it like a magic wand.
 
Design your ideal writing day. Try writing it in third person, the writer experiencing his/her/their ideal writing day.
 
Tip: If the answer is ‘I don’t know’, dare yourself to fill the line anyway. Then maybe the next. Give it a few minutes – because the flow takes turning the tap on.
 
 
Main Exercise:
 
“Whenever I write, I listen to a thunderstorm soundtrack on noise cancelling headphones. And not only does it drown out everything going on around me, but it's a Pavlov's dog kind of thing. As soon as I hear that noise, my mind immediately snaps into writer mode.” JD Barker
 
- If I could give my focus one gift, what would it be?
 
- If I could give myself one piece of advice about my writing life, what would I offer myself?
 
Read the answers back to yourself. How will you use your personal training tips from you to you this week?
 
Cool-down Exercise:
 
“Years back it was paper notes, know, I scribble it down and put it down somewhere. I learned very early on, like when you wake up at three o'clock in the morning and you get an idea for your book, you'll tell yourself you're going to remember it in the morning and you never remember it in the morning. So I've always written it down.” JD Barker
 
Where in your house could you put a notebook and pen, or post-it notes, where you don’t have them already? What else would make the distance from brain to world a little less far?

Returning to Being a Writer – Prano Bailey-Bond joins the Writers' Gym

Today’s episode and writing workout feature the art and life of Prano Bailey-Bond. Prano is an award-winning filmmaker and screenwriter who grew up on a diet of Twin Peaks in the depths of a strange Welsh community. Her work invokes imaginative worlds, fusing a dark vocabulary with eerie allure, revealing how beauty resides in strange places. Prano shares with Dr Rachel Knightley her early influences, creative fuel and sources of confidence and how directing her debut feature was when she reengaged with being a writer.
 
For a writing workout based on Prano’s interview with Rachel, scroll down or visit WritersGym.com to download every Writing Workout in the series.
 
Find out more about Prano at https://www.pranobaileybond.com/about
 
Join our mailing list at drrachelknightley.substack.com or get in touch at thewritersgym@rachelknightley.com
 
 
Writing Workout based on Prano’s interview
 
Warm-up: The Drive
 
“It was a filmmaker who said… some filmmakers are driven by wanting to tell the world something that they think, and some are driven by wanting to understand something that they don't understand. And I think I'm probably the latter.” Prano Bailey-Bond
 
Take a blank sheet of paper and choose one of these questions:
 
What do I want to say?
 
What do I want to ask?
 
Tip: If the answer is ‘I don’t know’, dare yourself to fill the line anyway. Then maybe the next. Give it a few minutes – because the flow takes turning the tap on.
 
 
Main Exercise:
 
Read your answer back to yourself. What visual images come up? Or what conversations between characters in your life?
 
Draw one of the images.
 
Write one of the conversations (the actual dialogue – what the characters say to each other/how they argue with each other!).

Adrian Tchaikovsky talks Writing Health (and Insects)

Episode 2: Adrian Tchaikovsky
 
Today at the Writers’ Gym, Dr Rachel Knightley is joined by multi-award-winning science fiction and fantasy author Adrian Tchaikovsky. Find out how early experience running Tabletop roleplaying games combine with Adrian’s childhood inspiration (mainly insectoid) and adult inspiration (including coffee) to create his career as an author and what a healthy, happy writing life means to him.
 
Adrian Tchaikovsky is a British science-fiction and fantasy writer known for a wide-variety of work including the Children of Time, Final Architecture, Dogs of War, Tyrant Philosophers and Shadows of the Apt series, as well as standalone books such as Elder Race, Doors of Eden, Spiderlight and many others. Children of Time and its series has won the Arthur C Clarke and BSFA awards, and his other works  have won the British Fantasy, British Science Fiction and Sidewise Awards.
 
For a writing workout based on Adrian’s interview with Rachel, scroll down or visit WritersGym.com to download every Writing Workout in the series.
 
Find out more about Adrian at https://adriantchaikovsky.com
See him on tour: https://adriantchaikovsky.com/events.html
 
Join our mailing list at drrachelknightley.substack.com or get in touch at thewritersgym@rachelknightley.com
 
 
Writing Workout based on Adrian’s interview
 
Warm-up: Map of Me (or, in honour of Adrian, Spider of Me)
1. Write your name in the middle of a page. Circle it, andgive that circle as many legs as you like. At the end of each leg, write something you love. An interest, an activity, a band, a caffeinated beverage, anything. Spend 1-2 minutes filling the page. There’s no such thing as ‘random’ or ‘irrelevant’ or ‘wrong’. Just go for it.
 
2. Circle three things. Don’t think about why you’re picking them, just circle.
 
3. Select one of those three. Decide that whatever you write with that prompt, for fifteen minutes, is (the first draft of) something your dream publisher wants to publish.
 
4. Write exactly what comes to you, letting yourself have fun. Be curious. Remember there are no wrong answers. Write for fifteen minutes and see where you go.
 
Main exercise:
The First-Person Monty Python Helmet
Step into a character who loves one of those now. Consider what they see, hear, touch, taste and smell. What do they think in their minds, and feel in their bodies, as a response to their emotions?

Dr Rachel Knightley and Ashley Lexine - Building Creative Confidence at the Writers' Gym

The Writers’ Gym is not just a podcast: it’s a membership platform, supporting writers (and writers-to-be) in buildingcreative confidence, growing their writing life and beating the inspiration addiction. Membership of the Writers’ Gym puts you in charge of your writing. It means creative confidence for life, work and art. It also means being part of a writing community with group and one-to-one sessions and personal support available throughout the week.
 
Founder and Writers’ Gym PT Dr Rachel Knightley is a fiction and non-fiction author, lecturer in Creative Writing and a qualified business and personal coach. This series, Rachel will be talking to award-winning authors across the genres. She kicks off this new series by introducing its producer: Writers’ Gym member, freelance writer (featured in Take a Break, Woman and Good Housekeeping) and Healthy Metal Hippie podcast founder and podcast editor extraordinaire Ashley Lexine.
 
For a writing workout based on each author’s interview with Rachel this series, visit WritersGym.com to download every Writing Workout in the series. See each workout below in the show notes.
 
Find out more about Ashley at https://healthymetalhippie.com
 
Join our mailing list at drrachelknightley.substack.com or get in touch at thewritersgym@rachelknightley.com
 
Writing Workout based on Ashley’s interview
 
Warm-up: Ideal week
 
Imagine your pen is a magic wand. What you write is going to happen. Not only is it going to happen, it’s going to happen without upsetting or offending anyone. What you plan is going to be absolutely fine.
 
Write the days of the week in the middle of a page. Put times at the side. Place writing time exactly where you want it. Then put in whatever else is important, around that.
 
Just look at it. Breathe it in. What does ideal look like? Imagine it happening. What does it feel like?
 
Take one small step. If there were one step you could make today, to make your week look one step more like the week you’ve just designed:
-What would it be?
-Who would you need to speak to?
-What would you tell/ask them?
 
 
Main exercise:
 
Assumption-identifier
Whether or not you’re a nine-to-five person, pick one of these three promises to gift yourself every workday this week:
 
-I promise my writing self I’ll take five-minute (or ten-minute) ‘writing breaks’ whether that means a locked loo door, or going outside like a smoker. If smoking breaks don’t destroy a working day, my writing breaks won’t either.
 
Or
 
- I promise my writing self I’ll write down my ideas as they happen. I’ll always have a pen, or my phone notebook. Wherever I am, I’ll make sure I write down key words to get me through that door later when I return to the thought. Or maybe I’ll ‘vomit draft’ the scene I think of right away.
 
From the show:
 
For creating time:
 
“If I go to the loo at work for five minutes, no one's going to be like, where were you? I'm going to take out my notebook, sit on the floor, and it's five minutes… the way other people do smoking breaks.”
For creating confidence (which is really curiosity!):
 
To get yourself out of ‘telling’ the reader and into ‘showing’ the reader what it is to be human… I dare you to jump into their head for five minutes or 10 minutes.” Transcribe what they think, feel, see, hear, the thoughts in their mind, the feelings in their body.
 

Memory and Flashback

In this final episode of season 3, Dr Rachel Knightley and Emily Inkpen chat about memory and flashback and the ways in which authors can use them to add colour, realism and plot twists to their work.   Harking back to our episode about unreliable narrators, we look at the ways in which our memory can play tricks upon us and we examine memory-loss as a plot device.  As always we end with a writing exercise from Rachel. 
 
Rachel, Emily and Chris would like to thank everyone who has listened to season 3.  Listen out for a new series coming up in 2025. 
 
Join the Writers’ Gym and book your next writing workout at https://www.rachelknightley.com/the-writers-gym/
The Writers Gym Podcast is an Alternative Stories production for The Writers' Gym.
Find out more about The Writers' Gym and Rachel Knightley by going to: https://www.rachelknightley.com/
Find out more about Emily Inkpen and her work by going to: https://www.emilyinkpen.com/
Learn more about Chris Gregory and Alternative Stories here https://alternativestories.com/
Follow the Writers’ Gym and contact us on Social Media:
https://x.com/TheWritersGymRK
https://www.instagram.com/jointhewritersgym/
https://www.facebook.com/JoinTheWritersGym/
Subscribe to The Writers’ Gym in your favourite podcast app to be notified of all new episodes as they are released.
Contact us by email at thewritersgym@rachelknightley.com
 
 
 

A Writer's Fuel

Whether it be ensuring the correct amount of nourishment for your body, exercise, a good sleep or combinations of aspiration and fear, writers tend to need to look after themselves in order to produce their best work.  In this episode Dr Rachel Knightley and Emily Inkpen look at fuel for writing.  And coffee...lots of coffee.
Join the Writers’ Gym and book your next writing workout at https://www.rachelknightley.com/the-writers-gym/
The Writers Gym Podcast is an Alternative Stories production for The Writers' Gym.
Find out more about The Writers' Gym and Rachel Knightley by going to: https://www.rachelknightley.com/
Find out more about Emily Inkpen and her work by going to: https://www.emilyinkpen.com/
Learn more about Chris Gregory and Alternative Stories here https://alternativestories.com/
Follow the Writers’ Gym and contact us on Social Media:
https://x.com/TheWritersGymRK
https://www.instagram.com/jointhewritersgym/
https://www.facebook.com/JoinTheWritersGym/
Subscribe to The Writers’ Gym in your favourite podcast app to be notified of all new episodes as they are released.
Contact us by email at thewritersgym@rachelknightley.com
 

Prologues and Epilogues

In this episode Dr Rachel Knightley and Emily Inkpen discuss prologues and epilogues and how writers can use them to create intriguing openings and satisfying endings for their fiction.  As usual we range from novels to TV, film, and audio drama looking at good and not-so-good examples. 
 
Join the Writers’ Gym and book your next writing workout at https://www.rachelknightley.com/the-writers-gym/
The Writers Gym Podcast is an Alternative Stories production for The Writers' Gym.
Find out more about The Writers' Gym and Rachel Knightley by going to: https://www.rachelknightley.com/
Find out more about Emily Inkpen and her work by going to: https://www.emilyinkpen.com/
Learn more about Chris Gregory and Alternative Stories here https://alternativestories.com/
Follow the Writers’ Gym and contact us on Social Media:
https://x.com/TheWritersGymRK
https://www.instagram.com/jointhewritersgym/
https://www.facebook.com/JoinTheWritersGym/
Subscribe to The Writers’ Gym in your favourite podcast app to be notified of all new episodes as they are released.
Contact us by email at thewritersgym@rachelknightley.com

Narrators

In this episode we look at the role of narrators in fiction and discuss when, how and whether to deploy them.  As usual Dr Rachel Knightley and Emily Inkpen bring examples from their own writing and from the wider worlds of literature and drama. 
 
Rachel would like to point out that it was Arthur Dent's upper arm that was bruised and not his elbow.
 
Join the Writers’ Gym and book your next writing workout at https://www.rachelknightley.com/the-writers-gym/
The Writers Gym Podcast is an Alternative Stories production for The Writers' Gym.
Find out more about The Writers' Gym and Rachel Knightley by going to: https://www.rachelknightley.com/
Find out more about Emily Inkpen and her work by going to: https://www.emilyinkpen.com/
Learn more about Chris Gregory and Alternative Stories here https://alternativestories.com/
Follow the Writers’ Gym and contact us on Social Media:
https://x.com/TheWritersGymRK
https://www.instagram.com/jointhewritersgym/
https://www.facebook.com/JoinTheWritersGym/
Subscribe to The Writers’ Gym in your favourite podcast app to be notified of all new episodes as they are released.
Contact us by email at thewritersgym@rachelknightley.com