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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 of our annual writing retreat in [...]

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 all. Bear with me. Let’s start with the idea [...]

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 meditation on fiction, on truth and, [...]

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, but also of [...]

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. [...]

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 interest. And [...]

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 say, a really bad [...]

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 well worth retailing. I think [...]

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 houseboat floats frozen. [...]

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 one who’d love to represent an [...]

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 [...]

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 best [...]