Richard Benyon’s blog

In the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, the protagonist, Lewellyn Moss, is a hunter who comes across evidence of a drug deal gone wrong in the desert. He finds an attaché case full of money [...]

Hi fellow writers, Trish and I have been planning our annual trip to our boat in England for the summer (lucky us), but have encountered a number of delays that mean we’ll be here for six weeks [...]

With a colleague, I’ve been devising a fairly complex story, running over ten or so years, featuring the adventures of a young man as he transitions from childhood, through adolescence into young [...]

Why is the point of view you choose to write in so critical to the effects you wish to create in your narrative? The writer’s job, as I’ve said before, is to create characters and a world in such [...]

I’m going to get to my subject today in a roundabout way, if you don’t mind. Sometimes the route you take to your destination is as interesting as the destination. My step-daughter’s about to [...]

I continue to think of parallels between life and the imaginary worlds of all our fictions. There have to be these equivalences, because otherwise fiction wouldn’t resonate with us; we wouldn’t [...]

The skills and insights of creative writing have more applications in the “real” world than we sometimes realise. Politics, for instance, consists largely of opposing narratives. Different [...]

Paul O’Rourke is a New York dentist, and the eccentric hero of Joshua Ferris’s Man Booker short-listed novel To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. Ferris is a dazzling young writer who announced [...]

“Nobody knows anything…… Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re [...]

I just wanted to check in with you to see if you’ve had a chance to think about joining Michele Rowe and me for our Guide to Creative Screenwriting course. If you have a dream of writing for film [...]

  For the past week or so I’ve feasted on a memoir called Educated by Tara Westover, a Cambridge PhD history graduate who began life as the youngest daughter of a religious and political [...]

Our fresh-out-of-the-box Guide to Creative Screenwriting is a ten-week on-line course starting on 15 March. The course runs you through the essential skills required by anyone who wishes to write [...]