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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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]