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When I taught young journalists, I told them to stop halfway through their story and ask themselves: Am I bored? Last week I suggested a couple of questions you could use to interrogate a story [...]

Writers are born, not made. True or false? It’s an interesting question because it puts on the table the issue of whether bad writers can become good writers. On a recent webinar we suggested [...]

I’ve been watching Dark, the fabulously complex story of time travel and alternate universes, on Netflix – and am currently drowning in that very complexity midway through the third season. Time [...]

So you’ve worked out a story, and you think you’re ready to start. Only, there’s one decision you haven’t made: from whose perspective should you tell the story? There’s often not an easy answer [...]

Billy Wilder was one of Hollywood’s great writer-directors. He was responsible for such evergreens as Some Like it Hot, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard and many, many others. Towards the end [...]

“So there’s this woman, see? And she has a child from a previous relationship, but the father didn’t know he had a child. The mother of the child struggled as a single mother, but now the father [...]

“It’s best not to dwell on what you’ve written, wishing it could be different. We all write what we can. We do the very best we can. You might think, oh, I wish I could write like so-and-so, but [...]

We live, as I might have mentioned before, on a houseboat at the end of a pontoon in a lake fed by the River Great Ouse in Bedfordshire in the UK. We are virtually surrounded by water. Birds of [...]

The significant detail can usually nail a description, or pierce to the essence of a character. Think of the sentence from a Guy de Maupassant story: “He was a gentleman with red whiskers [...]

You don’t need to feel strongly about a theme or subject to write about it. In fact, I think it’s a disadvantage. I dislike theme-heavy fiction. I find it heavy-handed and didactic and it makes [...]

In the nineteen-eighties, a writer named Elizabeth Tallent published four novels, and her short stories appeared frequently in The New Yorker. Then followed a 22-year silence. She has broken it [...]

I read something about literature the other day which warmed my heart. It’s something I’ve always believed and which I think holds great lessons for writers. Here’s an extract from the article, [...]