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I’ve been puzzling over a small challenge I’ve given myself: to turn a recent experience I’ve had into a short story. The nature of the experience is not in itself very important – although to me [...]

It’s been a demanding year. There’s not a person I’ve spoken to who hasn’t faced a cost-of-living crunch, trouble at work or home, or an illness. I want to share why you should never let go of [...]

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 [...]

Our local is just a short walk away from our boat in Priory Marina in Bedford. Local cinema, that is. (Our local pub is even closer.) Yesterday evening we took advantage of our proximity to [...]

It’s called “argument by authority” and all the best rhetoricians frown on it. A bad argument, they say, is not improved by quoting an authoritative voice in support of it. A good buttress, you [...]

Does everyone know how Green Eggs and Ham came to be written? I certainly didn’t until I stumbled across a reference to it on the internet. It appears that Dr Seuss’s publisher at Random House, [...]

Many people tell us that, when they first come to our Creative Writing Course, we ruin reading for them. I usually say they should be so lucky. They’re learning to read like writers and, after a [...]