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Tomorrow, on November 1, tens of thousands of people around the world will settle themselves down at desks or in commuter trains, in the cramped quarters of tourist class in jet airliners, on [...]

As a novelist, you shouldn’t be too kind. We all know Kurt Vonnegut’s exhortation to put your characters through hell, but do we always heed it where our own beloved characters are concerned? I [...]

I think in the film and television business we talk more about agency than people do when discussing stories destined for print – although why this should be so I’m not sure. By “agency” I am [...]

If you want to be reminded that characters are the most important part of a narrative, go and read (or reread) George Elliot’s Middlemarch. I have just done exactly this and was struck by how [...]

A story doesn’t consist of a series of unrelated events. Everything that happens is linked causally or psychologically to what came before and what follows. People often forget this, particularly [...]

I’ve dipped into advice given by the Man Booker-prize-winner, John Banville, before, and I’m about to do so again – and for good reason. In unrehearsed conversation, he comes up with such [...]

I “caught” polio when I was seven. It was an exhausting chase, but I managed at last to bring the virus down and invite it in. It took me on a long journey, unfinished still, that, of course, I [...]

Tears streamed down her cheeks. She wept and wept, sobbing into her sodden tissue until it dissolved and she was left hiccupping… It’s worth making the point again because I keep noticing [...]

I’ve been researching film structure. Perhaps because there’s so much money at stake in every movie – and unthinkable fortunes at risk in many movies – a great deal of thought has been devoted to [...]

Thinking works best when lying. I wrote last week about how too much thought can be a bit of a cheat. It’s a little too easy to use a character’s thought process to explain things to the reader, [...]

I’m sure I share at least one idiosyncrasy with many millions of my fellow human beings: I love to watch people. I could quite happily spend an entire morning on a sidewalk café simply eyeing my [...]