HeyJaredA Writer's Diary
Writing wisdom, advice and encouragement for every day of the year.
Part of A Writer's Diary Podcast. Follow the publication for all its platforms.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 14
- Latest publication
- Sep 30, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Aug 5, 2026
Latest issues
On the Right Attitude to Writing (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Sometimes you’ll find you have no heart for writing; I can’t put it any more intellectually than that.Alone with what you’ve failed to make.You are dead to it and it is dead to you because it is it and you, to your shame and dismay, are just you.My advice on this would be, Become — if only temporarily — someone else.Which is impossible, yes, but what I mean is, Sidestep the concerns of your usual identity; write, for a while, as another would write.(This may come too much from the kind of writer
What’s the Difference Between Novels, Short Stories and Poems? (opens the original)
Read excerpt
What follows is a generalisation; a useful one I hope:The novel and the short story, but also the novella, take on the task of depicting society in different ways. This may sound vague, and for society I might have said the world.To put it as simply as I can, Short stories tend to be about a small number of people in a limited number of places over a short time. And novels are the opposite, Novels tend to be about a large number of people in a wide variety of places over a long time.However, the
What’s the Difference Between Novels, Short Stories and Poems? (opens the original)
Read excerpt
It is readers who truly make the difference between novels and short stories. Because, beyond the analogies, there is the decisiveness of audience.Short stories are different from novels in this way: short stories have better readers.Or, further from snappiness but closer to accuracy (at this stage), short stories expect their readers to be better – live in the possibility of it – and are written always in the glowing-growing space of that hope.(Poems have for the moment gone off in a flap – you
Accidental AI Chat from 1996? (opens the original)
Read excerpt
AI models chatting in ‘surreal’ dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargonThat was the Guardian headline yesterday. Fairly self-explan. And this was the paragraph that really got me:Asked by the Guardian to review some of the language, Tony Thorne, director of the slang and new language archive at King’s College London, said it was “very much Finnegans Wake and Flann O’Brien – there’s an Irish sur
What’s the Difference Between Novels, Short Stories and Poems? (opens the original)
Read excerpt
I have thought of funny analogies, plenty of them, to make the distinction – when I’m asked The Question.What’s the difference between...?If the novel is a whole cake, the short story is a biscuit, and the poem is a sweet.If the novel’s a marriage, the short story’s an affair, and I leave to your imagination what a poem is. If the novel’s an orchestra, the short story’s a string quartet, the poem’s a solo.Novel = tour guide; short story = acrobat; poem = poltergeist.But in order to take the ques
Publishing over time
Last 90 days. Choose a month to open its work.
Recurring subjects
Named in the text we hold. One piece can cover several.
Audience
No verified audience measurement yet.
About this data
Counts cover the work we have indexed. Tone needs enough text and a confident classification. Excerpts and episode notes are not full articles or transcripts.
Identity or attribution wrong? Suggest a correction.