Smyth Díaz

Tag: writing

  • An excruciating kind of nudity

    Since the release of Dolores and Other Sorrows, I have been to several open mic nights around Brussels. The book is a collection of short stories, so it lends itself to this format: I sign up to read, I enjoy some authors of poems, short stories or songs and then my name gets called. The…

  • Living in metaphors

    One of the things that I think all writers do is constantly have their mind elsewhere. If you see a writer, from the amateur beginner to the seasoned professional, with their gaze lost somewhere in the distance it’s likely that they’re actually thinking about a story they’re writing or else planning on writing. In some…

  • Beta reader checklist

    I’m in the process of writing a novel (yep, brain about to explode, paranoid about changing even a comma in case there’s a butterfly effect and it causes continuity problems downstream), and I realise that one of the things I’m going to need is beta readers (people who read the book before it’s published to…

  • The Billy Elliot syndrome

    Continuing my informal series on the journey of an amateur writer, I would like to speak today about the effort it takes to finish a writing project. The gruelling, excruciating, mind-warpingly hard, but at the same time supremely rewarding effort of finishing even the shortest haiku. Many people embark on the adventure of writing, and…