Monday Motivation

And a very happy, if belated New Year to you, too! I love new years and the opportunity they afford us to start afresh with new projects, new determination and a tankful of refurbished energy. [...]

In this, the fourth of four blogs – the 400th in the sequence – takes us back to the water, in this case, the River Great Ouse on which Trish and I frequently kayak, and in which I occasionally [...]

During my end-of-year-break, I’m reposting old blogs: the 100th, 200th, 300th and 400th in the sequence. I’ve become more and more convinced over the years, and my writing career, that Keats was [...]

During my end-of-year-break, I’m reposting old blogs: the ​100th​, 200th, 300th and 400th in the sequence. This, my 200th Monday Writing Motivation, was inspired – as many subsequent ones were – [...]

Over ten years I have written – as I recently announced with a little fanfare – some 500 Monday Writing Motivations. I’m currently taking a break – but thought that it might be fun to keep your [...]

A theme that has turned up time and again in these little essays is the virtues of restraint and limitation. I’m not sure whether this is not something that applies in life in general – I suspect [...]

One of the themes I keep returning to in these Monday meditations is that of motivation – motivating your character, that is. Your character is, let us say, a mild-managed middle-aged man who in [...]

I mentioned persistence last week – the persistence, in that case, of a cygnet beating its great wings against the water as it races down the waters of our lake in its determination to take [...]

Our most ancient origins lie in the sea. Palaeontologists and archaeobiologists tell us that two billion years ago, give or take an eon, the first self-replicating molecule somehow assembled [...]

Writers of all stripes and levels of experience have something in common. It’s not necessarily a particular love of words. Some writers, after all, are moved more by a love of the rewards they [...]

Attend, class! Today we’re going to build a character from the ground up. Our Monday Writing Motivation: The quirkful character will help you build a character fit for your fiction. Let’s start [...]

I’m sitting in Campo Santa Margarita here in Venice at a café table, on the shady side of the square. Across from me, beyond the trees and a couple of benches, the late afternoon sun brightens [...]