Monday Motivation

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 names should they give their [...]

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 storytellers [...]

How do you generate story? There seems an obvious answer to that: you imagine a series of events involving and challenging a character whose responses will then constitute your narrative. Well, [...]

I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship that springs into being whenever a reader picks up a book, opens it and begins the journey to which it is an invitation. Of course, this [...]

Story is woven through the fabric of human society, through our history, our customs, our institutions. It is the vector of communication and persuasion. It supports relationships. It generates [...]

Here’s a very short reflection on an absolutely essential attitude to writing. It can be encapsulated in a single, short dictum: The only question to worry about in your writing is, does it work? [...]

Writers are born, not made. True or false? It’s an interesting question because it puts on the table the issue of whether bad writers can become good writers. On a recent webinar we suggested [...]

I’ve been watching Dark, the fabulously complex story of time travel and alternate universes, on Netflix – and am currently drowning in that very complexity midway through the third season. Time [...]

Billy Wilder was one of Hollywood’s great writer-directors. He was responsible for such evergreens as Some Like it Hot, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard and many, many others. Towards the end [...]

Once, three or four years ago, I explored the possibility of creating a character like Donald Trump, then an unlikely candidate campaigning to become president of the United States. A lot of [...]

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 [...]