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I’ve spoken before about the implicit contract a writer strikes with her reader – a contract that includes such clauses as: I promise to tell a full story, paying proper attention to my [...]

Idly in search of ideas that might amuse and instruct you, I found myself watching one of the interminable Mission Impossible movies, in which the utterly and impossibly intrepid Ethan Hunt [...]

I often contemplate the power of habitual behaviour. I observe it daily in our cats. One habitually sits with his front paws – I tend to think of them as his hands – resting neatly on his curled [...]

I haven’t seen Lady Bird, winner of one of the top awards at the Golden Globes last night, but I have read the script – and one of its features confirms something we have always said about [...]

The challenge I posed a group of scribblers was to write a scene in which a trivial disagreement masks much deeper conflict between two characters. How to insinuate the presence of the elephant [...]

Why do throngs of people around the world feel the urge to record their thoughts and feelings and observations, but, more than that, to shape them into narratives that engage and enthrall others? [...]

I had a chat with a television production designer recently. This is the person who’s responsible for the look of a production, which includes the set design, and the dressing of those sets. She [...]

We’re about to cruise past Torghatten, a mountain on an island a kilometre or two off the Norwegian mainland, and just half an hour south of the Arctic Circle. It’s distinguished by an [...]

Here’s a lesson in restraint and suspense from that master of both, Michael Connelly: In Chapter 3 of his latest police procedural, The Late Show, which features a brand new protagonist, the [...]

I’m now onto the sixteenth CJ Box novel which documents the adventures of his Wyoming game and fisheries warden, Joe Pickett. Why have I become so addicted to the series? Well, they’re well [...]

We’ve been ensconced in the Palazzo Albrizzi in Venice for a few days now, spending our mornings talking to writers about their work, devising ways over hurdles (straight up and over) and through [...]

So, just occasionally, when writing has become a burden – or perhaps, at that moment when you anticipate that it will become a burden –  here’s an idea… It was inspired by immediate experience. [...]