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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 [...]

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 [...]

Maybe because of my struggles with my own writing, I’m highly sensitive to the struggles of other writers. I  love mentoring, because like a midwife, I enjoy the immense satisfaction of helping [...]

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 [...]

I continue to mine George Saunders’s A Swim in the Pond in the Rain for practical writing wisdom, and found myself rereading a section on revision, which I think is well worth retailing. I think [...]

We thought we’d escaped the worst effects of the latest cold spell to grip these emerald isles. In December, ten days of sub-zero temperatures left the lake on which our houseboat floats frozen. [...]

I’ve started off the new year with a close and thorough examination of a list of the four hundred plus literary agents of the United Kingdom – in search of one who’d love to represent an [...]

I’ve been experimenting with my friendly AI assistant– ChatGPT who I introduced last week. It/he/she has very obvious limitations, but it also takes the initiative in sometimes surprising ways. I [...]

An article in the New York Times alerted me to an existential threat confronting all writers. It’s an artificial intelligence construct called ChatGPT. The NYT calls it “quite simply, the best [...]

“I’m in London in a hotel listening to a couple behind me about to embark on an affair. It’s very exciting. I noted him putting his wedding ring in his pocket in the elevator on the way back from [...]