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Here’s a three-finger exercise for you: what are the sinewy fibres that link conflict, character and climax? The question arose as I pondered my strategies for our latest foray into the wilds of [...]

I’ve been puzzling over a small challenge I’ve given myself: to turn a recent experience I’ve had into a short story. The nature of the experience is not in itself very important – although to me [...]

You’re writing a story. It’s the one you’ve been dreaming of for years, the one you’ve been planning for months. You’ve written chapter one. The story stretches out before you to the sunlit [...]

Let’s have fun today thinking about the difference between real people and the people we create for our fiction, our characters. I’ve often pondered the nature of the reality of fictional [...]

The experiences and memories we accumulate over time are not unlike leaf mould. Year by year, just as the leaves of a million trees rain down upon the ground, so an infinite number of sensory [...]

I fell in love with reading when I was in a rehabilitation hospital recovering from polio.* No sooner had I escaped, than I tried my hand at writing but, as I remember it, failed abysmally. [...]

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 [...]

There’s a flat, yellow rock I swim out into the ocean to touch each day. It’s where I acknowledge what I have, give thanks … and beg favours of the creative muses. I’ve always been a bit [...]

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 [...]