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We often fear the blank page or the empty screen. But what if I told you that this void is actually the birthplace of creativity? In our free subscriber-only Monday Writing Motivation, Go back to [...]

During our trip to South Africa earlier this year, Trish and I made the long drive from Cape Town to Johannesburg over two days. We stopped over in a b&b on the outskirts of a little town in [...]

Don’t feel guilty for focusing on your creative needs – your life may depend upon it My mother was raised a Calvinist, so I was taught that time taken for myself was indulgent, a selfish waste of [...]

I wasn’t looking forward to Venice. I know – sacrilege, right? I wondered at myself. What did it say about me? Did it mean I was tired of life, as Samuel Johnson once said of London? But on our [...]

Hello from Venice Richard, Fred and I have been thinking a lot about creativity in the last few weeks. First, we’re in a city that exemplifies creativity. Whichever way you turn, you are [...]

Here’s a thing: in our bookshop in Wigtown, south Galloway, we have, at a rough estimate, some five thousand books. They’re all second-hand, of course – and they fall into a wide variety of [...]

I want to talk about names. Names we give our characters, names we give our houses and – our narrowboats. And what they can communicate about the meaning stitched through our stories. We’ve just [...]