Setting your writing intentions
I’m not sure that anything I’ve ever resolved to do at the start of the year has come to fruition. Something about the demands made by new year’s resolutions, the […]
Mining Your Inner World to Create Characters
Creating compelling characters can feel like an impossible task, especially when writing characters whose experiences and personalities seem far removed from our own. In both this blog and my [...]
The Art of Restraint in Writing
Do you find yourself over-explaining emotions or situations in your writing? In both this blog and my next subscriber-only Monday Writing Motivation mailer, I look into the power of restraint [...]
Lessons in creating authentic fiction from Salman Rushdie
Writers, are often told to ‘write what you know’, but what does that really mean when we’re creating fictional worlds? Richard’s recent subscribers only writing motivation mailer [...]
Six effective techniques to overcome writer’s block and boost creativity
As writers, we often face a dilemma: we need to keep writing, but sometimes our creativity runs dry. That’s when taking a break isn’t just a luxury—it’s a necessity. But […]
Monday Writing Motivation: A tangle of stories
In the final paragraph of his Origin of Species, Charles Darwin talks about the grandeur of nature in its many forms. He remarks on the fact that the complexity of […]
Monday Writing Motivation: Keeping a close eye on literary conflict
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 […]
Writing Motivation and Inspiration: Three cheers for our characters
Let’s have fun today thinking about the difference between real people and the people we create for our fiction, our characters. I’ve often pondered the nature of the reality of […]
Monday Writing Motivation: Memory and the creative writer
The experiences and memories we accumulate over time are not unlike leaf mould. Year by year, just as the leaves of a million trees rain down upon the ground, so an infinite number of sensory [...]
2023 in review: Celebrating the words that emerge from a community of writers.
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 […]
Five hundred motivational essays for writers – and counting
Our most ancient origins lie in the sea. Palaeontologists and archaeobiologists tell us that two billion years ago, give or take an eon, the first self-replicating molecule somehow assembled [...]
Monday Writing Motivation: Don’t be a worrywart
Writers of all stripes and levels of experience have something in common. It’s not necessarily a particular love of words. Some writers, after all, are moved more by a love […]
