Monday Motivation

Corona has narrowed our focus, as I noted last week – but it has also slowed us down. As events have speeded up, so our subjective experience of them has slowed glacially. We keep reminding [...]

We’ve slowly been adjusting to this strange new reality. News of one restriction is followed by news of another, more stringent requirement. We wonder what the consequences will be, short term [...]

Richard is feeling too unwell to write a Monday Motivation this week, so instead, we’ve decided to re-run this old favourite, originally written about five or six years ago. We have just [...]

I was lounging in a living room overlooking False Bay with a glass of a robust and musky cabernet in hand, when that question occurred to me: what does it take to be a writer? Fact is, the [...]

I feel like a dog worrying at a particularly obdurate bone – the bone that lies at the heart of the experience of reading about another person’s experiences, whether fictional or real. The point [...]

I wonder if I might, this week, trip lightly through a not-very-well tended garden of thoughts about writing, readers and books. There’s no theme connecting these thoughts; they are if you like, [...]

Are you offended by the ripe language that so many modern novels seem to relish? By their apparently gratuitous use of the f-word and the c-word, to mention just the two most egregious examples [...]

Not everyone you encounter – or create – has a dome-like head, or eyebrows that bristle comically, or sports a distinctive portwine mark on her cheek, or is invariably accompanied, like Mr Krook [...]

Let’s talk about writing at its most granular level, where the choice of words writers make affects our experience as readers on a second-by-second basis. Take a passage like this, for instance: [...]

Face acting is a particular skill that some actors possess. This ability to communicate a range of emotions, sometimes in quick and contradictory succession, is a gift to screenwriters who will, [...]

A little Latin to perk us up: Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requires. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. Of course you’ll all recognize this as one of Catullus’s most memorable [...]

The start, not just of a new year, but a new decade acts as a spur to all of you whose ambitions include finally getting round to writing the book you’ve bottled up inside for so long. The [...]