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We’ve just spent three days with friends in a remote village in the Klein Karoo. We were alerted to the plague of fieldmice they’re experiencing when a solitary mouse emerged […]

Creative writing is not, as some suppose, an arcane art over which only the select few are ever granted mastery, or to which there is access via a magic key, a secret skill available only to the [...]

In life, we prefer to avoid conflictual situations, ducking out of confrontations, avoiding arguments, generally seeking peaceful co-existence with our fellows. In fiction, by contrast, where [...]

Some critics have called Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina the greatest novel ever to have been written. Be that as it may, I want to devote today’s rumination to a single conversation […]

We all know (or we should) that no story can exist without conflict. But not everyone recognises why this is so. Discussing the elements of story recently, we were asked: […]

So you’re writing the first pages of your novel and want to set up the fact that Linda is as happy as she could ever hope to be with her […]