Richard Beynon’s blog

This is a story about a clutch of goose eggs, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and the eternal struggle between hope and despair. You might remember my tale last year about the Canada geese that [...]

Here’s a three-finger exercise for you: what are the sinewy fibres that link conflict, character and climax? The question arose as I pondered my strategies for our latest foray into the wilds of [...]

I’ve been puzzling over a small challenge I’ve given myself: to turn a recent experience I’ve had into a short story. The nature of the experience is not in itself very important – although to me [...]

Here’s a story about our visit to hear a world-famous writer talk about his music (and his writing), together with some of his advice – and what happened then. Trish booked us seats at the Queen [...]

You’re writing a story. It’s the one you’ve been dreaming of for years, the one you’ve been planning for months. You’ve written chapter one. The story stretches out before you to the sunlit [...]

Let’s have fun today thinking about the difference between real people and the people we create for our fiction, our characters. I’ve often pondered the nature of the reality of fictional [...]

I’ve been indulging in a deep dive into cosy mysteries and police procedurals, many of them independently published by their authors, rather than by established, traditional publishers. My [...]

I’ve been listening to a long and fascinating book by Naomi Klein called Doppelganger – about the confusion caused when thousands of people mistook her for another writer, also a Naomi – Naomi [...]

We went to the opera last week – one of those productions live-streamed from the stage of the Met Opera in Kennedy Centre, New York. It was one I wasn’t familiar with: Verdi’s La Forza del [...]

The experiences and memories we accumulate over time are not unlike leaf mould. Year by year, just as the leaves of a million trees rain down upon the ground, so an infinite number of sensory [...]

I fell in love with reading when I was in a rehabilitation hospital recovering from polio.* No sooner had I escaped, than I tried my hand at writing but, as I remember it, failed abysmally. [...]