Monday Motivation

I’d like to talk about the bad guys today – the enemies your hero encounters over the course of his journey. Of course, not every story features characters who qualify […]

We might read novels for the stories they tell – but often it’s the characters in them that linger. And so it’s worth pondering some of the most memorable of […]

I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship between readers and writers; and by the implicit contract entered into between a reader and the book – and hence the writer of […]

This brings us to up to the three hundred and sixty-fifth of my Monday Morning essays – and the last of the reprises I’ve allowed myself. It was written in […]

I find that I sometimes get so caught up in the convoluted complexities of my writing that I find myself mired, like a pith-helmeted explorer in quicksand, in my own […]

When I was at university, the writer whose new books we anticipated most was Kurt Vonnegut. He was cool. He was committed. He wrote books that straddled the line between […]

Listen up: You’re at your desk, right? Or your dining room table, or your kitchen table, or, in desperation, perched on a stool at the marble credenza in your bathroom, […]

I’m about to reach a milepost in these musings on the writer’s journey. I’ll soon be posting my 365th Monday Motivation. So, because I love symmetry, and because, for that […]

In December, Warner Bros releases Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. That bare announcement, long anticipated, was enough to get science fiction aficionados taking to social media in their thousands. Many [...]

It’s 8:17 on Friday morning. I’m sitting in our living room with the autumn sun streaming in, half blinding me. Through the sliding doors and the floor-to-ceiling windows I can […]

Let’s think about a series of very tiny – but, some say, enormously significant – decisions that every writer has to take when beginning a story, and that is, what […]

It’s become one of the most frequently repeated phrases in the film industry, traded among writers of all stamps, derided by the cognoscenti, while it continues to offer guidance to […]