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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 surreptitiously from [...]

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 that takes place [...]

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: “But how does that work [...]

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 new boyfriend Marvin. It’s important to your story because [...]