When you're feeling stuck and the sight of a blank page can be too intimidating, it can help to do a quick writing exercise to warm up. Here is one prompt I like to use, called Using The Senses.

The Jolly Christmas Postman is possibly one of the most interactive picture books I have read. I would usually read the book lying down on the carpet, in the narrow space between my bed and my wardrobe (it seemed bigger then), so I could spread everything out on the floor. I always went through the book slowly, savouring each item that came out of the envelopes.

As always the illustrious Neil Gaiman offers wise and inspiring words, this time from his popular commencement speech at The University of the Arts in 2012.

Last summer I wandered into Antipodes, a cute bookstore in Sorrento on the Mornington Peninsula. They had a lovely collection of books, but what caught my eye were the several large-format hard cover editions of classics, such as Brothers Grimm fairytales, Edgar Allan Poe and Sherlock Holmes stories, and Pride & Prejudice.

How do you defy a reader’s expectations while still fulfilling them? — C.S. Pacat on the challenges of writing genre fiction.

This was just one of the many nuggets of wisdom I picked up over the course of a day at the Emerging Writers’ Festival in Melbourne last June. For those who weren’t there, I thought I’d share some of the highlights and insights from each talk.

These are the types of books that made me fall in love with reading, and made me want to be a writer. If I could ever write a book that made someone feel the way I felt when I read these – the sense of wonder and mystery and adventure – that would be something indeed.