Richard Beynon’s blog

We’re sitting in a Pret a Manger somewhere in Farringdon having coffee and keeping a wary eye on the weather. We have an appointment in thirty five minutes across the road, but the forecast has [...]

One of the most interesting of all writerly processes is how a story slowly – or sometimes quickly – takes shape. Here’s an evolution of a story. Trish and I booked into an Airbnb over Christmas [...]

The Guardian last Saturday carried a series of short interviews with people who’ve been diagnosed with terminal diseases of one sort or another. I took a deep breath and read some of them. Each [...]

I have often said that story ideas for writers are there for the plucking, like so many ripe fruit. This signal truth was brought home to me with force on our recent holiday in South Africa. We [...]

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 [...]

What moved me most during the course of 2023 was not the publication of the book Step Back and Leap, which I co-authored with Patrick Mork; nor indeed the success of our annual writing retreat in [...]

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 [...]