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I spoke a week or two ago about getting stuck in a piece of writing, and having to work out what the problem is before you can push on. That “getting stuck” is a little too generic to be of much [...]

He uses variants of the phrase “he rolled his eyes” four times in Open Season; three times in the next book in the series, Savage Run; thirteen times in his next, Trophy Hunt; once in his next, [...]

Today we crossed London from Paddington Basin in the heart of the West End to Limehouse Basin in the east. It’s a journey of nine miles, and descends through twelve locks. It took us all of seven [...]

Devising a movie treatment is difficult, and the producer you present it to unforgiving. If the story doesn’t grab him (or her) at once and if the characters are not compelling then you might as [...]

Trish and I have just spent six weeks slowly working our way down the Thames River in our narrowboat Patience. We’re on the Grand Union Canal now, moored up in Paddington Basin in the heart of [...]

We’d come off the tidal Thames – a writhing, contained beast of a river whose coils you can feel flexing beneath the surface of the water – onto the Grand Union Canal at Brentford, in London’s [...]

Your challenge for August is to write a scene set on or around water. That might be a river, the sea, a pond or a swimming pool. It might even, convceivably, be a puddle covered in a film of [...]

Last month we dedicated our writing challenge to the creation of a creative community without borders, by sharing an international flash fiction contest, organised by the César Egido Serrano [...]