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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 [...]