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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 not all [...]

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 something like an “entangled [...]

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 [...]

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 fictional [...]

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 [...]

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 of our annual writing retreat in [...]

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 [...]

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 of the rewards they [...]

I’m sitting in Campo Santa Margarita here in Venice at a café table, on the shady side of the square. Across from me, beyond the trees and a couple of benches, the late afternoon sun brightens [...]

I’d like today to write a disquisition on walking.  The subject might fascinate me because I am myself so bad at it. Whatever the reason, though, I’m sitting now on a turn of the Rio Malcanton, a [...]

Hello from Venice Richard, Fred and I have been thinking a lot about creativity in the last few weeks. First, we’re in a city that exemplifies creativity. Whichever way you turn, you are [...]

We climb the stairs to the first floor of Ca’della Corte and mill about around the long dining room table. Liza says, out of the blue: “Persiflage…” “Persiflage?” I say. It’s a word I don’t [...]