The Writers’ Gym Podcast

Build creative confidence and beat the inspiration addiction with Dr Rachel Knightley. Every episode, we’ll discuss key writing topics while exploring the goals, exercises, tools and techniques to discover what you really want from your writing — and what your writing really needs from you.

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Episodes

Landing Patterns

14 hours ago

14 hours ago

Procrastination gets — entirely rightly — a pretty bad press. So how do we differentiate it from warming up and getting into the zone? In this episode, Dr Rachel Knightley celebrates landing patterns and how they can add to our enjoyment of the journey.

Monday Jun 09, 2025

Shooting the Should Fairies

Monday Jun 09, 2025

Monday Jun 09, 2025

Anxiety is not a documentary. It’s creative writing at its most natural and automatic. Yet we so often hear our own projected worst case scenarios more loudly than our own interest in our writing. In this episode, Dr Rachel Knightley invites you to grab a water-pistol and give the ‘should fairies’ the response they deserve. Step beyond your ‘shoulds’ into curiosity, confidence and creativity at the Writers’ Gym.

Monday Jun 02, 2025

Being in your character’s body as well as their mind isn’t always first-draft territory. For many writers, it’s easier to begin in an internal monologue, lost in thoughts and feelings which can then be frustrating to pin down to their causes: the triggers in the physical world for each thought, each feeling. The good news? It looks scary from the outside but, inside, that’s where the greatest fun is. Dr Rachel Knightley celebrates natural time and taking space in our own narratives.

Monday May 26, 2025

Trusting your reader is one of the most famous phrases in creative writing teaching. But how do we do that? And what might be stopping us? Dr Rachel Knightley explores the temptations of ‘telling’ versus the greater rewards of showing (not explaining) the reactions, feelings and thoughts that illustrate who a character is and why they show up in their world the way they do.
 

Monday May 19, 2025

Trusting your reader is one of the most famous phrases in creative writing teaching. But how do we do that? And what might be stopping us? Dr Rachel Knightley explores the temptations of ‘telling’ versus the greater rewards of showing (not explaining) the reactions, feelings and thoughts that illustrate who a character is and why they show up in their world the way they do.
 

Monday May 12, 2025

Dr Rachel Knightley’s Sherlock Holmes Snoopy lamp is something of a co-presenter this week. What object do you love, that connects you with your past or passions, that someone else might not see the magic in? Through showing the specifics of what characters love, we get so much more: a sense of their values and personality. When they talk to different people, we get different angles on that same essential truth. So jump in and start fictionalising the people and things that make your heart sing — or scream!

Vulnerability is Strength

Monday May 05, 2025

Monday May 05, 2025

‘Say the Thing’ is one of our most transformational pieces of writing advice Dr Rachel Knightley ever had. That editor wasn’t just showing her a masterkey to clarity and confidence on the page, but off it too. This episode of the podcasts explores how communicating what we love and what we fear deepens our characterisation, links character and plot, and our connection with the reader through the specificity of detail that gives writing its magic; that only comes when you’re truly exploring yourself and your world.

Stealthwriting

Monday Apr 28, 2025

Monday Apr 28, 2025

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.

Monday Apr 21, 2025

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.
 

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Conversations about writing with Dr Rachel Knightley and Emily Inkpen

Join us on The Writers' Gym Podcast for conversations about the process of writing with experienced authors Rachel Knightley and Emily Inkpen.  Alongside Chris Gregory of the spoken-word production company Alternative Stories, Rachel and Emily pick a different topic each week and discuss their experiences and share writing advice.   As well as interesting and entertaining discussions, Rachel offers a weekly writing challenge based on our topic at the end of each episode of the podcast.

Find out more about Rachel and her work here

https://www.rachelknightley.com/the-writers-gym/

For more about Emily and her writing go to 

https://www.emilyinkpen.com/

and for Chris and Alternative Stories go to 

https://alternativestories.com/

 

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