appeared in 1757 the first volume – of an eventual nine – of a strange novel entitled by the Reverend Laurence Sterne. A stream of consciousness narrative a hundred and fifty years before such a thing was, well, such a thing. The biography of the fictional Tristram Shandy is famous for its hilarious, rambling digressions. Tristram isn’t even born until volume three. Now, I hadn’t planned our journey through the Building Blocks of Creative Writing to be quite so Sternian in nature – I guess by devoting the first paragraph to a mid-eighteenth century novel I have already failed on that point even in this article. And I know I mentioned at the end of the last article we might possibly look at the advantages or not of planning, but I suspect most of you knew that was only a remote possibility. I always knew I wanted to take the opportunity given me in these pages to not only examine the Building Blocks of Creative Writing and the structure
