Monday Motivation

How do you write a best-seller? Shouldn’t be difficult. Bestsellers, after all, aren’t vaunted works of literary magnificence. For the most part, they’re just fast-paced stories, chockablock with [...]

Common threads run through many of humanity’s endeavours. Analysis in one field turns out to be startlingly appropriate in another. Artists seize on some of the more bizarre findings of quantum [...]

Behind every great story is a great idea. Trouble is, great ideas are not low-hanging fruit. They’re not the sort of things that occur to you every day while you’re brushing your pearlies. But if [...]

We’re tempted to write characters who have a single, focused goal: they want to triumph over their enemies; they want revenge, they want X, or Y, or Z to the exclusion of all else. They are, in a [...]

Elmore Leonard said: “Don’t write the bits that readers’ skip.” One reader* asks the obvious question: What are the bits that readers skip? On the face of it, it’s obvious: they skip the boring [...]

I’m in bed in Section1, Room 4:1 of a large hospital not far from home. I’ve just been sedated and had a probe inserted down my throat to enable a doctor to cast a cold eye at the left atrial [...]

Writing fiction requires that you deliberately trigger out-of-body experiences. You create characters whose consciousness you attempt to inhabit, so that you might the better be able to describe, [...]

It is a very curious process, this business of learning new skills. It proceeds by fits and starts. It was Ernest Hemingway channeling Mark Twain or F. Scott Fitzgerald (or someone else entirely) [...]

The dough of a particular variety of wholewheat bread is almost liquid. It slips between your fingers, it makes unexpected lunges for the edge of your working surface, it resists any attempt to [...]

Writers are God, we rather fatuously proclaim. We can do anything – bring characters to life, destroy them at will, have Fate take a hand in the affairs of men. All this is no doubt true – but [...]

George Sanders, winner of the Man Booker in 2017 for his Lincoln in the Bardo, and author of several books of astonishing short stories, makes an important point about detail in fiction in an [...]

Writing has rules, yes? Rules of punctuation. Rules of grammar. Rules regarding cause before effect (the first should come before the second). Rules regarding point of view. Rules regarding [...]