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One of the aspects of writing – and of teaching creative writing – that continually perplexes and frustrates me, is the difficulty, indeed the apparent impossibility, of teaching writers to write [...]

“Everybody who writes fiction draws from their own life, but if it ended there, it would be very boring,” says writer, Judy Blume. I came across her advice the other day and it chimed with me [...]

Films have a great deal to teach those of us who write for the page. Of course, the lessons of the screen have been slowly absorbed, by a process of osmosis, by all writers for well over a [...]

I don’t know about you, but I heard a great many lockdown resolutions which included the words “book” and “finish” or “get on with”. And I’ve heard an equal number of retractions since. I don’t [...]

We’ve been devising a workshop on a very particular aspect of romantic comedies. Every romcom is obliged to include a particular scene. You’ll recognize it the moment you see it: it’s when the [...]

Join our virtual weekend course from which participants will emerge with the first draft of a short story.   We will encourage and mentor you through the process of developing story, from [...]

Events, even carefully described disasters, don’t trigger our emotions. Only people can do that. We once had a mentoring participant who asked if readers really cared about the characters. “Don’t [...]

1. Write a lot Style is just another word for voice. The only way to generate a style that is uniquely yours is to write. Voice is all-important, and very difficult to prescribe. It can’t be [...]

In the time of coronavirus we’re all tempted to pull in our heads (or bury them in the sand) to wait out the pandemic. This is an understandable response to the onslaught. In times of danger and [...]

Point of view is a complex subject, which we cover in depth in our Creative Writing Course. Each point of view creates a subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle difference in what you write. It can [...]

For a hundred years and more, movies have been surprising, titillating and entertaining us with stories that are as ephemeral as spring blossom, or as consequential as the deepest human truths. [...]

“It’s best not to dwell on what you’ve written, wishing it could be different. We all write what we can. We do the very best we can. You might think, oh, I wish I could write like so-and-so, but [...]