Monday Motivation

Of course, we’re all members of the box-set society. No social gathering passes these days without someone asking for recommendations about the latest, or the best, or the overlooked gems of [...]

Writing can be hard. When you set out to write a scene, you are conjuring into existence circumstances, characters, actions and dialogue that you have never, in life, precisely encountered [...]

I’ve sometimes stressed how important it is, in creating the world of story, to use accurate details. Accuracy is really important because it lends credibility even to situations that are, on the [...]

Someone – can’t remember who, Hemingway? Salinger? – once said that by the time you’re twenty-one, you have all the experience you’ll need to fuel your writing machine for a lifetime. I’m not [...]

There are as many writing “practices” as there are writers. Donna Tartt begins, as I believe I’ve said before, with a random scene, involving random characters, the drama of which piques her [...]

Today I am venturing into the tricky waters of self-helpiness… Although, to be honest, I guess that everything I’ve ever written for this blog – which claims to have magical motivational [...]

“He was drinking brandy, pouring double mouthfuls into a glass that had somehow survived from his grandfather’s time, the glass tinged green and bubbled with the air of the old century. He had [...]

Stephen King wrote one of the best books ever published on writing. My bet is that you’re one of the thousands of aspiring writers who’ve read On Writing, and profited thereby. So there’s no [...]

Are there secrets to good writing? You know all the platitudes as well as I do, the ones that insist that it’s mostly a matter of sweat, and very little of inspiration. The idea that persistence [...]

I am not qualified in any sense to make the following statement: Mathematical models in the field of physics and cosmology bear a truly remarkable resemblance to the reality they purport to [...]

Germaine Greer once interviewed Luciano Pavarotti at his Italian villa. She was ushered through into the presence of the great man on the terrace where he was having breakfast. He looked up at [...]

Authenticity matters a great deal to some writers. Take Gregg Hurwitz, for instance, author of the Orphan X sequence of thrillers. He’s really good on lethal hardware. Here’s a paragraph on the [...]