Archives

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 [...]

The experiences and memories we accumulate over time are not unlike leaf mould. Year by year, just as the leaves of a million trees rain down upon the ground, so an infinite number of sensory [...]

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 [...]

The Guardian last Saturday carried a series of short interviews with people who’ve been diagnosed with terminal diseases of one sort or another. I took a deep breath and read some of them. Each [...]

There’s a flat, yellow rock I swim out into the ocean to touch each day. It’s where I acknowledge what I have, give thanks … and beg favours of the creative muses. I’ve always been a bit [...]

I have often said that story ideas for writers are there for the plucking, like so many ripe fruit. This signal truth was brought home to me with force on our recent holiday in South Africa. We [...]

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 [...]