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The instant we meet people, we start computing. We take in cues, without even realising it, and come to conclusions. Some of these we’ll adjust with time. Others we’ll confirm. It’s the same with [...]

Common threads run through many of humanity’s endeavours. Analysis in one field turns out to be startlingly appropriate in another. Artists seize on some of the more bizarre findings of quantum [...]

You answered our questions – and we’ve come up with a new free service Last month we asked you to participate in our survey and to answer two questions. Well, what were your answers? [...]

Behind every great story is a great idea. Trouble is, great ideas are not low-hanging fruit. They’re not the sort of things that occur to you every day while you’re brushing your pearlies. But if [...]

We’re tempted to write characters who have a single, focused goal: they want to triumph over their enemies; they want revenge, they want X, or Y, or Z to the exclusion of all else. They are, in a [...]

Elmore Leonard said: “Don’t write the bits that readers’ skip.” One reader* asks the obvious question: What are the bits that readers skip? On the face of it, it’s obvious: they skip the boring [...]

One of our mentoring participants had a thorny problem with speech tags the other day – which we were able to solve with examples from the work of another. A small group of characters were [...]

At a book launch I attended recently, the author was questioned about the great use he’d made of local slang, which embedded his new novel firmly in a time and place. It was particularly [...]

Writing fiction requires that you deliberately trigger out-of-body experiences. You create characters whose consciousness you attempt to inhabit, so that you might the better be able to describe, [...]

We come upon our character lying in bed (or in a restorative bath, for that matter). She sighs, overcome by the dramatic events which have lately overtaken her. Events which she then remembers. [...]