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Writers of all stripes and levels of experience have something in common. It’s not necessarily a particular love of words. Some writers, after all, are moved more by a love of the rewards they [...]

We’ve just spent three days with friends in a remote village in the Klein Karoo. We were alerted to the plague of fieldmice they’re experiencing when a solitary mouse emerged surreptitiously from [...]

On Page 382 of Colm Toibin’s The Magician, a biographical novel which takes as its subject the life of one of the twentieth century’s most revered writers, the German Thomas Mann, he has Mann say [...]

The curtains are drawn around the corner bed diagonally opposite me in our ward, and have been for some time. Now a plaintive cry arises from the occupant, an elderly gent with a military bearing [...]

She’s loud, she could very well have had a drink or two too many – and there seems to be nothing the matter with her. Which is puzzling, since we’re both in A&E at Bedford Hospital, [...]

The patient in the bed nearest the bathroom is, of course, old. He’s also confused. “Where,” he asks in a north country accent, “am I?” The nurse at his bedside, sorting out his medication in a [...]

My stream of Monday ruminations was rudely interrupted a couple of months ago by illness – and an unexpected visit to the Elizabeth Ward of Bedford Hospital. Over the next eleven days all I had [...]

We’ve often quoted a guru who urged writers to use details that were “specific, accurate and honest”. The use of that last adjective has always puzzled me. How can a detail be “honest”? I’ve come [...]

Life is a narrative composed of multiple overlapping stories. This is true for every one of the eight billion or so there are of us. Each of those stories can be told in terms of a series of [...]

It’s Tuesday afternoon. Jo-Anne is in her study, working on her blogs. Imagine that as the start of a scene. Okay, it tells you what I’m doing, and when. It’s clear enough, isn’t it? But does it [...]