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I’d like today to write a disquisition on walking.  The subject might fascinate me because I am myself so bad at it. Whatever the reason, though, I’m sitting now on a turn of the Rio Malcanton, a [...]

However grand your story idea, however vivacious your characters, the success of any writing project always boils down to the sentences you write, and the words you use to do so. This is, of [...]

We met at La Piazza in St Paul’s Square, just a stone’s throw from the river, for coffee. The sun was shining. The crowds of people browsing for vegetables at the Saturday market, were dressed [...]

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 [...]

Creative writing is not, as some suppose, an arcane art over which only the select few are ever granted mastery, or to which there is access via a magic key, a secret skill available only to the [...]

We sometimes throw around words like “truthful” and “honest” when we’ve been particularly impressed by a novel or short story we’ve read. We say of James Joyce’s Ulysses that it faithfully [...]

Specific details are magical. That was the gist of my blogs over the past couple of weeks: give us just one or two specific details, and we’ll be transported to another time and place. That [...]

A character is running through a crowd. She elbows passers-by, bumps into someone, shoves aside a group… Okay, we know what she’s doing, but we’re not there with her. Not unless we see (and [...]

It’s a perennial problem for writers – the long conversation which reveals essential information. The solution? Well, the short answer is: try to avoid them if you possibly can, [...]

Consider for a moment the four-dimensional world you live in. You might well be sitting at your computer at this very moment, reading these words… But a few minutes ago, or in  a few minutes [...]