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Unmotivated action is unbelievable and erodes the relationship between writer and reader. If, as a reader, you don’t believe that a character is capable of a given act, then you might as well [...]

Take advantage of our massive May discount of less 20% if you book and pay for any of these four courses by midnight on 31 May. Use the voucher code mayearlybird in either our UK shop or [...]

Let me develop a scenario, beginning from what really happened and then inventing elements that might turn it into a story, along the lines, you might have guessed from a preoccupation that has [...]

Let’s hear it for our community We’d like to take a moment to applaud you, the talented writers who make up our community. We’d like to celebrate your achievements and, in so doing, [...]

Recently, preparing for a webinar on the role of humour in stories, I totted up the number of television comedies I’ve written. It comes to somewhere in the region of 145. You’d think, therefore, [...]

Humour is an indispensable ingredient of creative writing – and yet it’s a subject that is very seldom raised in writing courses or in books on creative writing. It enlivens dialogue, adds a [...]

This challenge – to write an intriguing opening to a novel – wrung wonderful response from you, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Vying for top position are two entries that would have me [...]

Language is capable of making the subtlest of distinctions. In our quest to move the story along, we sometimes forget about this awesome power. We write as if the world is divided into the good [...]

Dialogue can make or break a story. How do you write a scene which doesn’t sound like a tick-tock conversation taking place in a void? Sign up for our Saturday Creative Writing Workshop on 8 May, [...]

Some years ago, on our creative writing course, one of our students told us of her dream: to write a novel about the relations between men and women in 13th Century Yemen. We were, naturally, [...]