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I want to talk about names. Names we give our characters, names we give our houses and – our narrowboats. And what they can communicate about the meaning stitched through our stories. We’ve just [...]

A question from Henry Spencer, a reader: “I am constantly being told by my daughter that I should never use exclamation marks. She virtually derides their use, considering it unprofessional. (She [...]

We returned to our narrowboat Patience this week and found on the foredeck, neatly deposited within the bounds of the lifebuoy we keep in case of aquatic misadventure, ten ivory coloured eggs. [...]

Current and forthcoming courses and retreats Our Creative Writing Online Course kicked off on Tuesday – but it’s by no means too late to sign up for a rollicking ride through the hills and dales [...]

I’d intended writing a deeply meaningful essay on… oh, I don’t know, any number of deeply meaningful thoughts I’ve had on writing, when I read an article by Barney Ronay on South Africa’s [...]

Being a writer sometimes demands that you put on the mask and the costume of a moral philosopher. I’ve just heard three writers doing just that in a conversation they held about the ways in which [...]

Stephen King said in On Writing that writing a story is a little like digging up a fossil. You spot a fragment of skull protruding from the rock. You carefully disinter that end of the fossil, [...]

I attended the Kingsmead Book Fair this weekend, until the knives of a stiff winter breeze drove me home. But I was there long enough to note down a phrase that the moderator of a session I [...]

Here’s a thing: I bought a David Baldacci novel this weekend. I’m not sure that I’ve read him before, although it’s hardly possible to avoid Baldaccis in any given airport, in any given [...]

I’ve written about lies and liars before because writers (of fiction, at least) are, looked at from the right angle, professional liars. But there’s another way in which lies and lying permeates [...]

There’s a story concerning a radio serial writer who for years had been producing the scripts for a fifteen-minute serial that ran five days a week, fifty two weeks a year. His producers, in a [...]

This month we celebrate a variety of writers whose commitment and talent has earned them a place at South Africa’s literary table. Writers who’ve learned that it’s possible to master the craft of [...]