Jeffers, Sheldon in NST

The New Straits Times today features a Q&A with illustrator Oliver Jeffers (left) who is in town for the British Council's Animating Literature: Words and Beyond conference. (For more on the conference visit Daphne's blog.)

And there is also an interview with author Jeremy Sheldon who ran some of the recent British Council City of stories workshops, who says that he first started writing as a bored teenager, confined to his dorm at Eton for rebellious behaviour. He says too that he got his love of story-telling from his mother who is Hong Kong Chinese.

About the workshops :

Sheldon said working with aspiring writers and having the opportunity to study their written work is similar to getting a “window into their hearts and minds”, an experience that still astonishes him every single time. ... His role said Sheldon is to function as the “external eye” and to show these aspiring writers not just the things they are already doing very well, but also to point out the few elements they may be missing.

The best piece of writing advice he received from his own teachers? :

... quite simply “write every day” ... Writing requires practice and writing daily, even if it’s only a little bit, can make a difference to aspiring writers. You need to keep working out what a colleague of mine calls the writing muscle. You can’t actually touch it or see it working but you know it exists.