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What are the craft skills that really move the needle? Jo-Anne Richards and Richard Beynon each chose their three most important creative writing skills — without comparing notes — and between [...]

Writing for the big screen (and the little screen) is very different from writing for the page – but the skill sets overlap.  Two of the biggest of these overlaps are dialogue writing and scenes. [...]

All About Writing’s latest writing challenge offers the winner a literary assessment on 5000 words of writing worth R 2750 or a voucher to the same value to use on one (or more) of our courses or [...]

Someone I know recently had a fall-out with a relative – over words that seemed to her trivial. For a time, she couldn’t understand it at all. After all, what she’d said wasn’t so terrible, was [...]

One of the participants in our Creative Writing Course responded to a dialogue exercise recently with a scene containing a domestic argument between newlyweds. It was riveting – and raw. One half [...]

Develop your character’s voice if you want us to share in their highs and lows, get to know them and care about them. But what does that really mean? Sure, people sometimes have speech quirks. [...]

All About Writing’s latest writing challenge offers the winner a mini book report on the first 5000 words of your manuscript (or detailed feedback on 5000 words of writing) worth ZAR 2750. Here’s [...]

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, [...]

What do I love about Elmore Leonard’s dialogue? It’s terse, it’s droll, it’s economical. It punches above its weight. Take this sentence speech from Bandit: Jack said, “I’ve been to Carville. [...]

How do you go about developing a character? I think every major character must have certain aspects to their personality in order for them to become real in my mind, and hopefully the minds of my [...]