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All About Writing’s latest flash fiction challenge offers the winner a literary assessment on 5000 words of writing worth R 2750 / £ 150 or a voucher to the same […]

How do you communicate a character’s sense that someone they’ve encountered is somehow “off”, not right, not to be trusted, possibly even homicidal? The question arose during a discussion [...]

Science tells us that at the normal speeds at which we live our lives, time passes as the clock ticks – at an invariable rate. At our velocity approaching the […]

I have a list of words that I know but have never used, certainly, never written. One of them is “threnody” – which means, as I understand it, a poem […]

When I was younger – but not in any sense a youth – I devoured what are now called Young Adult novels. I hate the term, because, among other things, […]

Writing is a serious business, wouldn’t you say? It requires that you shed your defences and dig down deep to mine seams of memory and emotion. It requires that you […]

For obvious reasons, we usually spend a great deal of time thinking about the protagonist of our stories. He or she is unambiguously our Hero. But we don’t spend as […]

Writers observe. Their observations serve as the foundations on which characters are built and stories developed. We’re in Venice at the moment on our annual retreat – rudely interrupted by […]

Once in a while, when I have the time, I allow myself the luxury of writing an extremely abbreviated Monday Motivation. I was trawling through old notes of mine and […]

“So who was Alan? Is he your cousin, or your brother-in-Law?” Laura said, clearly perplexed. “Neither,” I said. “He was my second cousin. Thomas’s son.” “Was? Won’t he be at […]

All About Writing’s latest flash fiction challenge offers the winner a literary assessment on 5000 words of writing worth R 2750 / £ 150 or a voucher to the same […]

In a little more than a month, we will be hunting for truffles in Istria during the course of our Croatian writing retreat. It’ll demand a keen sense of smell, […]