Monday Motivation

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

We live, as I might have mentioned before, on a houseboat at the end of a pontoon in a lake fed by the River Great Ouse in Bedfordshire in the UK. We are virtually surrounded by water. Birds of [...]

The significant detail can usually nail a description, or pierce to the essence of a character. Think of the sentence from a Guy de Maupassant story: “He was a gentleman with red whiskers [...]

There are two kinds of people in the world, as I think someone else might have said before me: people who are more comfortable in the world of make-believe; and people who are more comfortable in [...]

Suspense, in fiction, is created when we pose questions and then delay giving the answers. The reader, eager to find out those answers, will read on. But how about life? Life, after all, is full [...]

Think for a moment of some of the most memorable sentences in literature.  “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”; or “It is a truth universally [...]

Some critics have called Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina the greatest novel ever to have been written. Be that as it may, I want to devote today’s rumination to a single conversation that takes place [...]

There are on the lake on which our houseboat is moored cormorants and swans, black-headed gulls and common terns, mallard ducks and moorhens, a resident heron, a pair of crested grebes, coots and [...]

There are at least two reasons that writers should always have a book on their bedside table, or be immersed in several books simultaneously. (The New York Times regularly runs interviews with [...]