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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 [...]

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 speed of light, Einstein said, time [...]

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 or a song of lamentation – especially for the [...]

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, some books categorised as YA deserve a much [...]

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 attempt the virtually [...]

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 much time as we should on the [...]

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 Covid [...]

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 came across a short and [...]

“So who was Alan? Is he your cousin, or your brother-in-Law?” Laura said, clearly perplexed. “Neither,” I said. “He was my second cousin. Thomas’s son.” “Was? Won’t he be at the lunch on Sunday?” [...]

In a little more than a month, we will be hunting for truffles in Istria during the course of our Croatian writing retreat. It’ll demand a keen sense of smell, I imagine – although I’m pretty [...]

I’m still entangled in the wilds of The Magic Mountain. I learned during a break in my hectic reading schedule that a lexical analysis of the original German version of the book revealed that the [...]

I’m sometimes asked how long a novel should be. I begin by talking about the length of various pieces of string, but then, after a little humming and hawing say something like this: Somewhere [...]