Monday Motivation

Novels are, first and foremost, stories. Their first job is to intrigue us, involve us, surprise us, jolt us, shock us – and entertain us. The best novels of their eras – from Bleak House and [...]

Oscar Wilde was at dinner with a group of friends when one of them delivered a little off-the-cuff bon mot of wit and elegance. Oscar exclaimed, “Oh, I wish I’d said that!” A rather more cynical [...]

Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya stands on the brink of an athletic breakthrough that many thought could never be achieved. In the Berlin marathon in September, he set a new world record of two hours, one [...]

For 40 years the New York artist Cindy Sherman has been photographing herself in a huge variety of disguises, playing a remarkable number of dramatic roles, pretending to be, oh, the chatelaine [...]

I bet you’re a kind and compassionate person. You might not be an animal lover, but you’d never be wantonly cruel to a mutt.  You don’t taunt homeless people as losers. If you were confronted [...]

Today I’m going to do a little thieving. The object of my theft is a wonderful blog written twelve years ago by the writer of the screenplay for one of my favourite movies, Little Miss Sunshine. [...]

Why do we read? Well, it all depends on the reader, and, of course, what they’re reading. I doubt that Richard Nixon’s former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the still-redoubtable and [...]

I’ve had arguments – some passionate to the point of mutually assured destruction – over this single issue: should you develop your characters and the bones of your story, before you start [...]

I’m sitting in Campo San Polo in the coolth of the umbrellas of the Bar Cico, surrounded by a sprinkling of patrons. An elderly Italian man wrinkled and weather-worn sporting a fine set of long [...]

Need some instant inspiration to get writing? Who doesn’t. Here are ten of our Monday Motivations, all focusing on story, sure to spur you on. Read them all at once, or one a day, to gain advice, [...]

There was, in Bedford in the UK, a curious institution called the Panacea Society. It was a millenarian religious group, founded in 1919 which followed the teachings of a nineteenth-century seer [...]

It’s a delicate tightrope we walk. On the one hand, if we provide too much information, we run the risk of turning a suspenseful story into a ho-hum record of events. Restraint in feeding your [...]