Tips for Writers

The middle can be the most daunting part of the book to push through. The beginning rushes out after you’ve been thinking about your story for months. But the middle is where writers get stuck, [...]

Last week, and in the next couple, I am featuring the writing advice of our mentoring participants – those who are finishing a first draft, in the middle or who have recently begun.

In our mentoring programme, we have a number of writers who are either just beginning, in the middle, finishing a first draft or working on a second. I asked a couple of them to share with you [...]

Just because something is “true”, just because it happened, doesn’t mean it’s a story. This came up recently because we were assessing a manuscript – a memoir – and had to give the writer advice [...]

A piece of writing is like a set of dominoes. Overset one aspect and you overset all those that follow. We come across this problem a great deal in our mentoring programme. Each scene follows [...]

If you’ve been trying to write, you will no doubt have been challenged to adhere to the holy trinity of writing advice: write what you know, find your voice and show rather than tell. The first [...]

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” – Pablo Picasso There’s a certain point at which writing skills must melt away and become part of your being, [...]

New writers often ask whether they ought to be writing “for an audience”. It’s a complex question because, deep down, we all hope to be read by someone other than ourselves. But when you start [...]

We’re well into the second week of our annual Venice Writing Retreat, and it has struck me again, as it does every year, how creative it is to gather together a group of writers and allow them to [...]

So here we are in Venice, for our annual All About Writing retreat. Everywhere we turn, there is another vista: the quiet canal, which runs down one side of our palazzo. The cobbled square into [...]

I once read about a study which compared the happiness levels of those who had children to those who were childless. The general levels of happiness were higher, apparently, among the childless. [...]

A friend of mine once found herself seated beside a doctor on a flight. “And what do you do?” he asked expansively, after treating her to a half-hour discourse on his many achievements. “I’m a [...]