2023 in review: Celebrating the words that emerge from a community of writers.
What moved me most during the course of 2023 was not the publication of the book Step Back and Leap, which I co-authored with Patrick Mork; nor indeed the success […]
Monday Motivation: Where boundaries dissolve
I’m not sure where this is going to lead me today, but I’m going to take a chance and risk writing something that might end up going nowhere useful at […]
Monday Motivation: The why’s that fiction pose
A friend recently sent me a link to the acceptance speech given by the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature, Olga Tokarczuk. It takes the form of a […]
Monday Motivation: Repossessing the past
I’ve always regretted having a memory that dredges up numbers, but not conversations or passages of writing that I’ve read and loved. Memory – not only of conversation and texts, […]
Monday Motivation: Who can tell the writer from the word?
I was listening recently to a programme on the radio in which musicians were talking about their relationship with their instruments. These were all professionals, leading violinists or cellists. [...]
Monday Motivation: Existential threat or brainstorm partner?
Together with what sometimes appears to be the rest of the world, I have followed the debate around ChatGPT – the artificial intelligence search engine and chatbot – with great […]
Monday Motivation: Marxism v. Pear Petals
Frequently when we’re asked to assess someone’s manuscript, or help a writer brainstorm a story idea, we have to begin by stating a fundamental principle of fiction. It is, we […]
Monday Motivation: How to inject your voice into your writing
I continue to mine George Saunders’s A Swim in the Pond in the Rain for practical writing wisdom, and found myself rereading a section on revision, which I think is […]
Monday Motivation: Walking on water
We thought we’d escaped the worst effects of the latest cold spell to grip these emerald isles. In December, ten days of sub-zero temperatures left the lake on which our […]
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 […]
