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We’ve had someone on our mentoring programme who has been struggling for months with a story, which just hasn’t been coming together. The main character didn’t ring true. We couldn’t understand [...]

I’ve been thinking about sentences recently. They are, after all, the building blocks of every story ever written. We all love a good sentence, I think. I particularly like dazzlingly long [...]

One of our mentoring participants is busy writing a charming memoir about settling in a small community – trying to make friends and build a meaningful life among the sometimes eccentric people [...]

Annie Dillard in her book on what it takes to be a writer, The Writing Life, recounts the story of a fellow writer who was asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?” The response was: [...]

We all know people who think themselves morally or intellectually superior for reading non-fiction instead of fiction. And recently, the numbers of non-readers have been swelled by the digital [...]

The challenge I posed a group of scribblers was to write a scene in which a trivial disagreement masks much deeper conflict between two characters. How to insinuate the presence of the elephant [...]

One of our mentoring participants has held us in suspense for roughly 70 000 words. (In tranches of 5 000 words a month, that’s quite some wait). I’m not going to tell you exactly what happens [...]

Why do throngs of people around the world feel the urge to record their thoughts and feelings and observations, but, more than that, to shape them into narratives that engage and enthrall others? [...]

All About Writing’s latest writing challenge offers our most generous prize yet: a place on our brand-new online course, the Creative Writing Day by Day coaching programme, worth R2250, which [...]

I’ve been saying this a great deal to our mentoring participants recently: don’t weigh down your sentences. Don’t rush to get all you can into one sentence. Slow down, break things up and you’ll [...]