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On Saturday ten days ago, Trish and I set out for Box End Lake. We were taking part in our 24-hour relay swimming marathon. Our team was eight strong. This meant that over the course of 24 hours, [...]

All writers are readers – and everything we read makes a difference, sometimes so subtle as to be undetectable, to our writing. I know that when I want to write something in the style of, say, [...]

Next Saturday and Sunday I, and seven others – members of the Wet and Wild swimming group formed for just this purpose – will be taking part in a fund-raising swim at a lake not far from our [...]

Whenever I read something that moves me, inspires me, or reminds me of the fact that all lives are messes and that therefore mine is no exception, I feel proud to be a writer contributing in some [...]

What’s your Monday Writing Motivation? And how does it fit in with paleontologists? Palaeontologists have discovered, in the scrolls of rock that constitute a unique repository of ancient [...]

Monday writing motivation. Here’s a thought: what are characters up to when they’re not active in your story? Remember, they’re not human beings. A human being is busy with all sorts of things [...]

Who is your best and wisest reader? Who is able to offer you the most cogent and practical advice in your quest to make your story as good as it possibly can be? Writers I’ve worked with have [...]

I’ve often celebrated the many gifts writing bestows on the writer: the sharpened eye, the joy that springs from creating something from nothing, the pleasures of devising the felicitous phrase, [...]

Introducing an episode of a series of short radio programmes recently, the presenter* said: “I’d like you to imagine strapping on a big eye mask. It completely covers your eyes. Inside is a [...]

Yes, of course literary conflict provides the driving impetus of all narrative. But from time to time every writer earns the right to indulge their desire simply to celebrate beauty or [...]

War talk is much in the air these days. We talk of “the war” in the way that our parents and grandparents must have referred, in their day, to “the war”. We’ve learned or relearned the vocabulary [...]

St Neots, a small town straddling the River Great Ouse a few locks down from Bedford, holds a market every Thursday in the town square. It was the site, in July 1648, of a pitched battle between [...]