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In the final paragraph of his Origin of Species, Charles Darwin talks about the grandeur of nature in its many forms. He remarks on the fact that the complexity of something like an “entangled [...]

Spring seems at last to have broken out in the United Kingdom. The last few days have seen hours of uninterrupted sunlight for what seems like the first time in months. As the weather improved, [...]

Here’s a three-finger exercise for you: what are the sinewy fibres that link conflict, character and climax? The question arose as I pondered my strategies for our latest foray into the wilds of [...]

You’re writing a story. It’s the one you’ve been dreaming of for years, the one you’ve been planning for months. You’ve written chapter one. The story stretches out before you to the sunlit [...]

Let’s have fun today thinking about the difference between real people and the people we create for our fiction, our characters. I’ve often pondered the nature of the reality of fictional [...]

Ever asked yourself  any of these questions? What exactly does a professional book editor do? How does development editing differ from copy-editing, for instance? What’s really involved [...]

I fell in love with reading when I was in a rehabilitation hospital recovering from polio.* No sooner had I escaped, than I tried my hand at writing but, as I remember it, failed abysmally. [...]

We’re sitting in a Pret a Manger somewhere in Farringdon having coffee and keeping a wary eye on the weather. We have an appointment in thirty five minutes across the road, but the forecast has [...]

One of the most interesting of all writerly processes is how a story slowly – or sometimes quickly – takes shape. Here’s an evolution of a story. Trish and I booked into an Airbnb over Christmas [...]

During my end-of-year-break, I’m reposting old blogs: the 100th, 200th, 300th and 400th in the sequence. I’ve become more and more convinced over the years, and my writing career, that Keats was [...]

During my end-of-year-break, I’m reposting old blogs: the ​100th​, 200th, 300th and 400th in the sequence. This, my 200th Monday Writing Motivation, was inspired – as many subsequent ones were – [...]