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Paul Auster is the author of seventeen novels, the latest of which, 4-3-2-1, was published last year and short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. I bought it back then, but took time to dive into [...]

Specific details are magical. That was the gist of my blogs over the past couple of weeks: give us just one or two specific details, and we’ll be transported to another time and place. That [...]

We’re back on Patience in this new warm English weather that seems to have become a fixture here. All around us lie a fleet of narrowboats: Patricia and Star, Bess and Syren, Birdsong and Slow [...]

Reading fiction is good for us – and that’s not one writer’s opinion, but the conclusion of neuroscientific research. Studies have shown that the language of fiction: imaginative metaphors, [...]

Stories drive us. They’re what help us make meaning – and so, sense of our world. They help us make decisions about our own existence. Stories of one sort or another power the world. They’re the [...]

I want to talk today about the remarkable properties of glue when it comes to assembling story. You remember what E.M. Foster said about the difference between story and life? The king died and [...]

“Wow, that was like watching a movie.” This was the response of a participant in my Creative Writing Course to the writing of a fellow – and it came as a revelation to her. They all wrote [...]

Anyone can learn to write It was five weeks into my current face to face Creative Writing Class on Monday. The participants had been reading their assignments out for comment and feedback over a [...]

This is not a puff-piece. It’s rather a salute to the sort of commitment to the craft of writing that we could all learn from. It’s inspired by one of our students, half-way through our online [...]

Use specifics to draw us in. That’s the key to writing well. Give us the particular, we’ll expand it, if necessary, to visualise the whole. I find this type of paragraph in a great many [...]

One of the most succinct definitions of art that I’ve ever come across is this: Art is repetition with variation. After all, there’s no real conceptual difference between Michaelangelo’s David, [...]