Monday Motivation: The challenge of Voice
I’ve started off the new year with a close and thorough examination of a list of the four hundred plus literary agents of the United Kingdom – in search of […]
Monday Motivation: A final word from the oracle of things to come
I’ve been experimenting with my friendly AI assistant– ChatGPT who I introduced last week. It/he/she has very obvious limitations, but it also takes the initiative in sometimes surprising ways. I [...]
Monday Motivation: Ha, ha, the joke’s on us
An article in the New York Times alerted me to an existential threat confronting all writers. It’s an artificial intelligence construct called ChatGPT. The NYT calls it “quite simply, the […]
Monday Motivation: The writer as voyeur
“I’m in London in a hotel listening to a couple behind me about to embark on an affair. It’s very exciting. I noted him putting his wedding ring in his […]
Monday Motivation: Don’t rush things
How do you communicate a character’s sense that someone they’ve encountered is somehow “off”, not right, not to be trusted, possibly even homicidal? The question arose during a discussion [...]
Monday Motivation: Time and the panicking writer
Science tells us that at the normal speeds at which we live our lives, time passes as the clock ticks – at an invariable rate. At our velocity approaching the […]
Monday Motivation: There’s a special kind of hell reserved for these
I have a list of words that I know but have never used, certainly, never written. One of them is “threnody” – which means, as I understand it, a poem […]
Monday Motivation: Pursue the anomaly
When I was younger – but not in any sense a youth – I devoured what are now called Young Adult novels. I hate the term, because, among other things, […]
Monday Motivation: The serious business of being playful
Writing is a serious business, wouldn’t you say? It requires that you shed your defences and dig down deep to mine seams of memory and emotion. It requires that you […]
Monday Motivation: The solution to a milquetoast story
For obvious reasons, we usually spend a great deal of time thinking about the protagonist of our stories. He or she is unambiguously our Hero. But we don’t spend as […]
Monday Motivation: People watching in Venice
Writers observe. Their observations serve as the foundations on which characters are built and stories developed. We’re in Venice at the moment on our annual retreat – rudely interrupted by […]
Monday Motivation: Ten steps to a compelling character
Once in a while, when I have the time, I allow myself the luxury of writing an extremely abbreviated Monday Motivation. I was trawling through old notes of mine and […]
