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“So there’s this woman, see? And she has a child from a previous relationship, but the father didn’t know he had a child. The mother of the child struggled as a single mother, but now the father [...]

Films have a great deal to teach those of us who write for the page. Of course, the lessons of the screen have been slowly absorbed, by a process of osmosis, by all writers for well over a [...]

The significant detail can usually nail a description, or pierce to the essence of a character. Think of the sentence from a Guy de Maupassant story: “He was a gentleman with red whiskers [...]

I was listening to someone quoting Elmore Leonard the other day – and then she laughed. And she’s right: he is funny. I mean, “Leave out the bits that readers tend to skip”? What does that mean? [...]

A little Latin to perk us up: Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requires. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. Of course you’ll all recognize this as one of Catullus’s most memorable [...]

I’ve not been a great Tarantino fan – not, at least, since the Kill Bill duet, which left me feeling unengaged and rather bored with all the operatic but strangely bloodless violence. But then, [...]

One of the reasons Dickens was such a great writer is that every character we encounter on his pages is vivid. He gives us just enough about each, no matter how incidental they may be to the [...]

We were recently approached for help with a writing project in which the writer wished her sole protagonist to be a true psychopath, who enjoyed killing. I’m not saying this hasn’t been done, but [...]

If I were to give you a writing exercise challenging you to describe yourself, how would you go about it? What sort of information would you give? Well, of course I have no idea whatsoever what [...]

We recently advised one of our mentoring programme participants that a protagonist “lacked oomph”. The character ran away from problems and relied on others to rescue her. I didn’t respect her as [...]

When people first enter our mentoring programme, they often come with grand issues, extensive landscapes and multitudes of characters. It’s good to remind ourselves that writers have achieved [...]

We’re tempted to write characters who have a single, focused goal: they want to triumph over their enemies; they want revenge, they want X, or Y, or Z to the exclusion of all else. They are, in a [...]