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In this, the fourth of four blogs – the 400th in the sequence – takes us back to the water, in this case, the River Great Ouse on which Trish and I frequently kayak, and in which I occasionally [...]

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 [...]

How do you communicate a character’s sense that someone they’ve encountered is somehow “off”, not right, not to be trusted, possibly even homicidal? The question arose during a discussion [...]

We’ve often quoted a guru who urged writers to use details that were “specific, accurate and honest”. The use of that last adjective has always puzzled me. How can a detail be “honest”? I’ve come [...]

Creative writing is not, as some suppose, an arcane art over which only the select few are ever granted mastery, or to which there is access via a magic key, a secret skill available only to the [...]

We sometimes throw around words like “truthful” and “honest” when we’ve been particularly impressed by a novel or short story we’ve read. We say of James Joyce’s Ulysses that it faithfully [...]

It’s through the small details of a novel that we learn of the large issues, and from which we gain a sense of the world in which it takes place. You don’t need to explain to us, for example, the [...]