Monday Motivation

This is the first piece I’ve written in this brand-new, fresh-out-of-the-box 2019. I’m in trouble. But it’s not the first time I’ve been here. I seem to remember that I face the same problem [...]

Some people have a kind of preternatural understanding of story structure, an inborn ability to create memorable characters and a clear appreciation of the need for detail, tension and conflict [...]

Characters, like quarks*, come in many different flavours. There are large, silent characters, whose presence is felt but not greatly demonstrated. There are small, voluble characters that, like [...]

I’ve been writing a little fable about the adventures of Bella and Basil who’ve been charged with looking after a bookshop in Wigtown for a couple of weeks. The inspiration for each twist and [...]

Here’s a thing: in our bookshop in Wigtown, south Galloway, we have, at a rough estimate, some five thousand books. They’re all second-hand, of course – and they fall into a wide variety of [...]

Salley Vickers is a one-time lecturer in Shakespeare and the nineteenth century novel, among other things, a remedial teacher and a psycho-analyst specializing in helping people who are [...]

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. [...]