The secrets behind the practice of good writing

As human beings, we know how it feels to live through intense emotion so, as writers, we want our readers to experience the same shivers and beats of the heart. There’s nothing wrong with that. [...]

When you’re struggling with a piece of writing, you long for a breakthrough. But when it comes, it’s not always comfortable. Two of our mentoring participants recently experienced significant [...]

Last week I spoke about writing as a two-way exchange of trust. Part of that trust is playing fair. Readers don’t like to feel ripped off. I gave this advice to one of our mentoring participants [...]

Reading and writing creates a two-way exchange. It’s a matter of trust. The reader must trust their imagination to the writer, who in turn must trust and believe in their readers. This is a [...]

People always talk about stand-up comedians and their timing – but you seldom hear people comment on the excellent timing of writers. And yet timing is essential to making a piece of writing [...]

Say you’ve set up a mystery in your novel. All through her life, a young woman has tried to get her father to talk about her long-lost mother. He has resisted and she has lived with the mystery. [...]

As a novelist, you shouldn’t be too kind. We all know Kurt Vonnegut’s exhortation to put your characters through hell, but do we always heed it where our own beloved characters are concerned? I [...]

If you want to be reminded that characters are the most important part of a narrative, go and read (or reread) George Elliot’s Middlemarch. I have just done exactly this and was struck by how [...]

Tears streamed down her cheeks. She wept and wept, sobbing into her sodden tissue until it dissolved and she was left hiccupping… It’s worth making the point again because I keep noticing [...]

Thinking works best when lying. I wrote last week about how too much thought can be a bit of a cheat. It’s a little too easy to use a character’s thought process to explain things to the reader, [...]

Don’t let your characters think too much. It can be a cop out. I had this discussion with a writer friend, who tries to avoid using “inner life” in his novels because “it feels like cheating”. He [...]

We understand that conflict lies at the heart of all drama – that the tension between what your protagonist wants and what stands in the way of his satisfying that desire is what drives all [...]