If you’ve got a spare couple of hours on your hands and you’ve decided you want to write something – but aren’t working on any project – how would you start writing? Do you have a favourite starting point for writing? Do you have a writing exercise that you do for fun

n every day life almost all of what we know and assume is absorbed through what we see, hear, taste, touch and smell. The challenge though is that we all have a primary sense, a few that are average and one sense that definitely lags behind.

Thought I’d turn the tables today; rather than ask you a question this Friday I thought I would offer to answers your questions.

Follow the guidelines – This sounds like a really basic statement, and in reality it is, but I expect most readers would be shocked if they heard just how many stories don’t get put in front of a judge purely because this point is ignored.

It occurred to me yesterday that since I’m holding the 2011 ‘First Line’ short story writing competition, with it’s deadline in June, now might be a great time to cover some writing tips relevant to entering competitions.

If you had the opportunity to hear your favourite writer speak on writing and their books, what media would you most prefer they used?

Anyway – while I knew it would be fun for music and playing, I have to say that I didn’t realise there would be so many apps suitable for writers – free apps at that.

So I thought I would share with you the apps I’ve been experimenting with for ‘work’.

I was recently reading a curry restaurant menu that included a typo (‘till’ instead of ‘til or until, I think). Instinctively I wanted to reach for a pencil to mark it or change it. In fact, its mere existence so totally distracted me that

Information and ideas have to be a central focus to any writer. After all, a whole book (fact, fiction or otherwise) can be written around one single idea or fact, as can any other kind of writing. It stands to reason, then,