Spellnotes
The official Spellbinder Blog, a platform for casual conversation between editors, contributors and readers, hosted on Medium as well under the account name Spellnotes.
Collaborative Notes
This column is dedicated to Spellbinder’s exchange with other individuals, groups and journals in the literary and artistic worlds.
Editor’s Picks
The Editor’s Picks section will showcase and review some of the best extracts from the works published in our back issues of the magazine.
Tips
The Tips section is an advice platform to help writers and artists to improve the quality of their work.
Resources
The Resources section will provide a series of writing and art group activities to help people learn about, as well as experiment within their preferred creative medium.
Prompts
The Prompts section expands upon the initial ideas we post through our Instagram channel.
Recent Posts
- Writing the Mind in Motion: Tips and Resources for Stream of Consciousness
Stream of consciousness is often described as the most intimate of literary techniques. It tries to capture the mind as it actually functions: layered, looping, distracted, luminous, contradictory. For writers it can feel liberating and disorienting at once. How do you capture the quicksilver movement of thought without losing the reader? How do you preserve… Continue reading Writing the Mind in Motion: Tips and Resources for Stream of Consciousness - Autumn 2025 – Drama
OTTO And we carry around your little bags. Always carrying around bags of things you don’t need. Bundles of yarn. Sweaters for kittens we don’t have. An old Bible you know nothing about. Bottles of paint and brushes. Crumpled receipts that are two years old. What do you need all that shit for? I once… Continue reading Autumn 2025 – Drama - Language-themed Prompts for Autumn
Spellbinder submissions for the Autumn 2025 Issue are open until August 14th! We’ll be sharing some prompts over the coming weeks to inspire your creativity during this submission period. For this autumn, we are proposing that you consider language as a subject for your writing. Whether you already speak multiple languages or hope to one… Continue reading Language-themed Prompts for Autumn - Writing Tips – Free Indirect Discourse
Our characters always seem so lively in our heads, don’t they? As writers, we’re privy to their every thought, every reaction, every heartbeat. The problem is, how can we bring that level of intimacy to a reader so that our characters are just as real to them as they are to us? One of the… Continue reading Writing Tips – Free Indirect Discourse - Writing Tips – Show, Don’t Tell
“Don’t say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me.” – C. S. Lewis I’m sure every writer has heard the phrase ‘show, don’t tell’ at some… Continue reading Writing Tips – Show, Don’t Tell - Researching and Writing Greek Mythology
My strongest memory from my time as a Classics student is of writing an essay on the various representations of a minor goddess in Ancient Greek vase paintings. I poured over all sorts of resources, studied images, essays, and even read an entire (albeit, rather short) book on the goddess herself. All for one five-page… Continue reading Researching and Writing Greek Mythology - Winter 2025 – DramaHIM Aren’t you going to ask why I’m here? HER No. But unless you hurry things up, you’re going to be more of a murder victim than a suicide. HIM Are you threatening me? HER Yes. HIM You can’t make me jump. HER No, but I can make you fall. I doubt oblivion will quibble… Continue reading Winter 2025 – Drama
- Winter 2024 – FictionIt’s rainy season in Jakarta with 78 percent humidity, according to the weather forecasts, but you always wake up dehydrated. Bunda says it’s because you eat too much MSG. Or, more precisely, you keep ordering food from restaurants that clearly use MSG and other artificial flavoring. She tries to teach you how to cook tempe… Continue reading Winter 2024 – Fiction
- Winter 2024 – DramaANNA Well. I mean … “friends” is a strong word. REFLECTION A temporary truce? ANNA Maybe. They smile at each other. REFLECTION Go get ‘em, Anna. ANNA Right back at ya! Being an actor is a funny thing. Dressing up, playing make believe, small rituals, doing warmups and exercises that may look strange to outsiders.… Continue reading Winter 2024 – Drama
- Winter 2024 – Art‘To The Island’ – Christopher Woods ‘To The Island’ reveals a melancholy, black and white snapshot of passengers traveling to an island by watercraft. The first word that appeared in my mind’s eye, when I saw this photograph, was loneliness. Also, when we think of island, many connect the word to isolation. In this interpretation,… Continue reading Winter 2024 – Art
- Winter 2024 – NonfictionIn Crash Test Dummy, Rose Mason delivers the universal anxiety of driving and thrusts with a tone so frank and forthright that the emotional dreamscape of subconsciousness and the clinical morbidity of facts merge together, inviting the reader along the inner-most routes of the narrators mind only to confront them with critical questions about male-oriented road safety that leaves the female driver and passenger inherently in danger.
- Winter 2024 – PoetryThe Aldgate Horses – LJ Ireton Now cool in the fountain – A memory of earth water; Squelching feet in fields With cleaner conscience, Louder heartbeats. The speaker conveys admiration for one of the bronze horse statues in London. A memory of earth water, under stone readings of oxygen. These are highlights of some of… Continue reading Winter 2024 – Poetry
- Winter 2024 – FictionIt’s rainy season in Jakarta with 78 percent humidity, according to the weather forecasts, but you always wake up dehydrated. Bunda says it’s because you eat too much MSG. Or, more precisely, you keep ordering food from restaurants that clearly use MSG and other artificial flavoring. She tries to teach you how to cook tempe… Continue reading Winter 2024 – Fiction
- Writing Tips – How to get unstuck from the writing process
*sighs* If only we could just transfer all the vibes and bits of ideas in our heads into our Word doc and magically have it arrange all the planning so all we have to do is write. And in correlation to what a friend of mine had said about how it is we don’t have… Continue reading Writing Tips – How to get unstuck from the writing process - Spring 2023 – Drama
‘The Nightmare Began When I Woke Up’ EVELYN: I guess we should start?EDITH: I guess so.EVELYN: My name is Princess Evelyn, and I was recently awoken from a sleepingcurse.EDITH: My name is Princess Edith, and I was recently awoken from a sleeping curse. By Kaylon Willoughby A fairytale retelling in a princess support group.Snow White… Continue reading Spring 2023 – Drama - Spring 2023 – Nonfiction
Saltwater, or how witchcraft led me to address my guilt and grief by Madeleine Brown Saltwater, or how witchcraft led me to address my guilt and grief is an excellent piece of creative nonfiction which we are very proud to have published in the Spring 2023 Issue of Spellbinder. Overall, Saltwater is a beautifully written… Continue reading Spring 2023 – Nonfiction - Spring 2023 – Poetry
‘Summer Solstice, 4:53am’ by Danielle Gilmour ‘I move so slowly through the acresthat my legs are dewy.The waters of the estuary are coming –or going – I’m unsure which butwhichever they are they don’t need to ask’ Danielle Gilmour’s poem ‘Summer Solstice, 4:53am’ is about giving birth. This subject matter is explored with a beautiful… Continue reading Spring 2023 – Poetry - Spring 2023 – Fiction
From time to time, a man would walk down O’Connell Street with a troupe of dancing bears. Now, this was not, in itself, unusual. A great deal is packed into those two opening sentences of Quigley Cryan Brockbank’s The Dancing Bears of O’Connell Street, and they do what every good short story opening should do.… Continue reading Spring 2023 – Fiction - Food-themed Prompts for Spring
First prompt: think about your favourite food, or a unique food you like, and incorporate it in a piece of fiction or creative non fiction. If writing fiction, you could play with POV and try to write the story from the point of view of the food itself, or even from each of the ingredients.… Continue reading Food-themed Prompts for Spring - Tackling Surrealism
A fantastic way to be more adventurous in your writing is to try your hand at radical literary and artistic movements by following their principles and engaging in decades of creative conversation. Surrealism is a movement which has remained fresh and ever-evolving, and has always been politically and culturally subversive. A great example of its… Continue reading Tackling Surrealism