Experimental fiction, poetry and literary mischief.
The GCSE English mark scheme is usually treated as a threat. What if it is a constraint-generator? This piece digs through AO5, AO6 and the strange poetry of 'secure control' to propose rubric-fed fiction that satisfies the examiner and sabotages the rubric at the same time.
Your council’s bin-day calendar is not just bureaucracy; it is an Oulipo constraint generator hiding in a laminated card. Here is how to let ‘no side waste’ and ‘rinse before recycling’ push your poems into stranger, sharper territory. Bring a caddy.
The late-night litany of gales, sea states and coastal names isn’t background noise — it’s a masterclass in rhythm, place and dread. Here’s how to raid the Shipping Forecast for your fiction, plus three exercises for drafting a forecast fiction of your own.
A collective should not be a LinkedIn group with crisps. Here is how to build a UK writers’ circle that treats experimentation as the point, shares the rejections, and rotates the strange.
The three-act structure has had a good run, like a carvery that never changes the menu. But the British Sunday roast offers richer narrative models: Yorkshire pudding as prologue, gravy as unreliable narrator, and the inevitable nap as denouement. Here are six roast-inspired plots for fiction that misbehaves deliciously.
Forget the brick-thick novel with the airport promotional budget. Britain’s real literary laboratory is a 24-page A5 pamphlet held together by two staples and a grudge against the mainstream. Here is why the chapbook scene matters in 2026, and how to join it without being fleeced.
Irregular verbs are not grammar’s embarrassing leftovers; they are tiny acts of narrative sabotage. A craft essay on suppletion, tense and the pleasures of a sentence that refuses to conjugate politely—with exercises for the badly behaved.
Arts funding loves a nice gallery and a library with good lighting. It should also love the launderette, the chip shop and the bus station—and pay experimental writers to notice what happens there.
The glossy author photo is a tiny monarchy demanding you buy the writer as well as the book. Experimental writing needs fewer brick-wall headshots and more masks, pseudonyms and absurd biographies. A starter kit for vanishing behind the work.
The 7:42 to Leeds is not a literary salon, but it is full of accidental surrealism. A practical, mildly unethical-looking guide to harvesting tannoy apologies, station signage and overheard fragments without becoming the person everyone avoids in the quiet carriage.
The British pub quiz is a beautiful machine for making people argue about capital cities. It can also be a delivery system for experimental literature. Here’s how to rig a round without getting barred.
Standard English has had a good run, but the well-made sentence is starting to look like a gated community. A defence of dialect grammar, irregular verbs and the glorious narrative mess that makes British fiction sound like it comes from somewhere.
Britain’s real avant-garde archive is not in a glass case at the British Library. It is a wobbly shelf near the till in a charity shop, wedged between a broken-spined thriller and a cookbook for people who fear vegetables. This is a field guide to the weird, cheap, out-of-print fiction that still turns up for 50p — and why we should treat the second-hand shelf as a proper literary institution.
The UK spoken-word scene has become glittering, competition-shaped and almost aggressively respectable. Bring back the draft that doesn’t work. Bring back the poem about a pigeon. Here is the case for a monthly bad poetry night — plus a practical guide to running one without turning it into a cruelty engine.