Richard Beynon
I am a storyteller whose career was launched when, at the age of seven, I contracted polio and struck a bargain with my hospital wardmates: they would strap my brace onto my leg – and I would tell them stories.
Since then, I’ve spent my life telling stories in countless forms – as a journalist, and writing for both the page and the screen. I’ve written over 1,200 scripts for drama and comedy, led dozens of writers’ rooms, and served as head writer on some of South Africa’s most popular soaps.
In 2006, I co-founded All About Writing with novelist Jo-Anne Richards. Together with our partner, Trish Urquhart, we’ve helped thousands of writers take their stories seriously – many of whom have gone on to publish award-winning work.
For seventeen years, I lived for months each year on our narrowboat, Patience, navigating the rivers and canals of England and Wales. I continued to write from the equally watery vantage point of a houseboat on a lake just off the River Great Ouse – and have, to date, completed well over 600 motivational essays about writing and life.
But I have stretched my wings – and have immersed myself in writing a series of cosy murder mysteries featuring an intrepid amateur sleuth called James Clatterbridge and his dogged wife, Inky.
The Craft, Creativity & Writing Life Series
The books I have written for writers are published under the umbrella title of Craft, Creativity and the Writing Life
These books have been born from decades of writing, teaching, and helping writers of every kind find their voices. Rooted in the conviction that writing should be both challenging and joyful, each volume approaches the writer’s craft from a different angle – finding inspiration in the world around us, understanding the architecture of compelling story, and exploring what it truly means to inhabit the identity of a writer. Drawing on personal experience, literary insight, and the hard-won wisdom of a lifetime of writing, and teaching, the series is not a collection of rigid rules but an ongoing conversation: warm, honest, and always alive to the wonder of putting words together. Each book stands alone, but together they form a deepening reflection on what it means to write, to tell stories, and to live a creative life.
BOOK 1. Waterlines: Writing Lessons from a Life Afloat
What happens when a storyteller trades land for water — and lets the slow rhythms of a narrowboat teach him how to write, live, and listen?
Every writer seeks the perfect balance, mastering craft while keeping the joy alive. Aboard Patience, his narrowboat on England’s canals and rivers, Richard Beynon reflects on how the patterns of water, weather and narrative intertwine, revealing how the craft of writing often mirrors the currents of the world around us.
Waterlines gathers the lessons of that life afloat — patient herons teaching the art of attention, stubborn locks revealing the power of persistence — into a lyrical blend of memoir, storytelling craft, and inspiration for writers and creatives. Each short essay explores how observation becomes description, how patience shapes voice, and how story grows from stillness.
Whether you write with publication in mind or simply for pleasure, Waterlines will remind you that great stories don’t come from forcing words, but from learning to flow with them. It invites you to slow down, listen, and rediscover the quiet joy that fuels the act of writing itself.
For readers of Annie Dillard, Anne Lamott, Natalie Goldberg, and Julia Cameron — and for anyone who finds in words their way of navigating the world — Waterlines offers a fresh voyage along the canals of craft and creativity.
If you’ve ever sat before a blank page and felt the tug of something deeper, step aboard. The journey begins here.
Getting Cosy – The James Clatterbridge Mysteries
The books written for the legions of cosy murder mystery fans are collectively called: The James Clatterbridge Mysteries
Abbey Marina sits on Abbey Waters in Bedfordshire, a small, eccentric community of houseboats and narrowboats tucked away from the world. James Clatterbridge is a horror writer in his early fifties who lives there with his wife Inky on Houseboat Number 7, Pontoon Pike.
James is a man who navigates the marina on his beloved mobility scooter Rocinante, makes his living from writing horror stories, and finds himself – with a regularity that would not entirely surprise him – drawn into the real thing.
Sharp, contrary, and constitutionally incapable of leaving a puzzle alone, James brings to each investigation the same quality of attention he brings to his fiction: an instinct for character, a taste for argument, and a cheerful willingness to construct elaborate theories that his more methodical, more sceptical wife will then take apart – a process he anticipates, accepts, and repeats without apparent remorse.
The Clatterbridge Mystery series is set in the heart of England, rooted in the rhythms of close-knit community life – the pub quiz, the allotment, the summer barbecue, the neighbour whose past doesn’t quite add up – and in the uncomfortable truth that the quietest places have the most to hide.
Murder as a Working Hypothesis
A body in the rhubarb patch was not part of the plan.
When Inky finds a body concealed in the rhubarb patch of their allotment on Ouse Allotments, James Clatterbridge’s quiet new life at Abbey Marina begins to unravel rather faster than he’d intended. The dead man, a rough sleeper known around the marina as G, seemed harmless enough when he was alive; the police think they have the case more or less in hand. Unfortunately, the murder weapon appears to be James’s missing dibber, which makes him, technically, a suspect. Murder as a Working Hypothesis is the first full-length Clatterbridge mystery: a story of allotment politics, environmental crime, and the uncomfortable discovery that virtue and monstrousness are not always mutually exclusive.
FREE JAMES CLATTERBRIDGE NOVELLA
Read a free digital copy of Murder as a Matter of Taste.
There are worse places to live than Abbey Marina. The boats bob, the geese honk at all hours, and the neighbours know each other’s business rather too well – which is generally a comfort, and occasionally a problem.
It becomes a problem the evening James Clatterbridge – horror writer, houseboat dweller, and regular customer of the marina’s fish and chip van – finds Molly Whitcombe dead beside her fryer.
