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I’m going to get to my subject today in a roundabout way, if you don’t mind. Sometimes the route you take to your destination is as interesting as the destination. My step-daughter’s about to [...]

I continue to think of parallels between life and the imaginary worlds of all our fictions. There have to be these equivalences, because otherwise fiction wouldn’t resonate with us; we wouldn’t [...]

The skills and insights of creative writing have more applications in the “real” world than we sometimes realise. Politics, for instance, consists largely of opposing narratives. Different [...]

Paul O’Rourke is a New York dentist, and the eccentric hero of Joshua Ferris’s Man Booker short-listed novel To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. Ferris is a dazzling young writer who announced [...]

“Nobody knows anything…… Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re [...]

I just wanted to check in with you to see if you’ve had a chance to think about joining Michele Rowe and me for our Guide to Creative Screenwriting course. If you have a dream of writing for film [...]

  For the past week or so I’ve feasted on a memoir called Educated by Tara Westover, a Cambridge PhD history graduate who began life as the youngest daughter of a religious and political [...]

Our fresh-out-of-the-box Guide to Creative Screenwriting is a ten-week on-line course starting on 15 March. The course runs you through the essential skills required by anyone who wishes to write [...]

I’ve been wondering why conflict is that absolutely essential element of drama that we’ve always argued it is. We’ve said that conflict creates uncertainty, uncertainty creates suspense – will he [...]

I’ve spoken before about the implicit contract a writer strikes with her reader – a contract that includes such clauses as: I promise to tell a full story, paying proper attention to my [...]

In a thoughtful article recently in The New York Times, Dara Horn took a few well-aimed swipes at billionaires who devote significant fractions of their fortunes to research into… immortality. [...]

Idly in search of ideas that might amuse and instruct you, I found myself watching one of the interminable Mission Impossible movies, in which the utterly and impossibly intrepid Ethan Hunt [...]