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Explore the mysteries and the craft of creating story with a group of like-minded souls in that most charming of Cotswold market towns, Stow-on-the-Wold. Far from our everyday preoccupations and [...]

We’re tempted to write characters who have a single, focused goal: they want to triumph over their enemies; they want revenge, they want X, or Y, or Z to the exclusion of all else. They are, in a [...]

A year is much like a book. It’s easy to begin with enthusiasm. More difficult to keep your writing goals from “sagging in the middle” of the year. Our flagship courses will give you practical [...]

I saw spots before my eyes as I was struck over the head by yet another “as” construction. I fully admit it, I’m an as-ist. I have developed an aversion to the word “as”. But there’s a reason for [...]

Elmore Leonard said: “Don’t write the bits that readers’ skip.” One reader* asks the obvious question: What are the bits that readers skip? On the face of it, it’s obvious: they skip the boring [...]

One of our mentoring participants had a thorny problem with speech tags the other day – which we were able to solve with examples from the work of another. A small group of characters were [...]

I’m in bed in Section1, Room 4:1 of a large hospital not far from home. I’ve just been sedated and had a probe inserted down my throat to enable a doctor to cast a cold eye at the left atrial [...]

At a book launch I attended recently, the author was questioned about the great use he’d made of local slang, which embedded his new novel firmly in a time and place. It was particularly [...]

We’d like to ask you two questions We like to say that we’re in the business of dreams. Our aim has always been to help you make your writing dreams come true. But to do that, we need to [...]

Writing fiction requires that you deliberately trigger out-of-body experiences. You create characters whose consciousness you attempt to inhabit, so that you might the better be able to describe, [...]

Remember our February/March writing challenge? We imagined that someone in his or her final year of school is tempted to forego the path laid out by a parent and instead join the circus. The [...]

All About Writing’s latest writing challenge offers the winner a literary assessment on 5000 words of writing worth R 2750 or a voucher to the same value to use on one (or more) of our courses or [...]