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Writing fiction requires that you deliberately trigger out-of-body experiences. You create characters whose consciousness you attempt to inhabit, so that you might the better be able to describe, [...]

Should you allow your characters to run off with the story? I was asked this again recently while teaching a Summer School course on fiction writing at a local university. It’s a romantic idea [...]

What books does your character read, if any? We all know, or we should, that one of the most crucial parts of writing fiction involves developing your characters. Build them, grow them into whole [...]

For 40 years the New York artist Cindy Sherman has been photographing herself in a huge variety of disguises, playing a remarkable number of dramatic roles, pretending to be, oh, the chatelaine [...]

Let me make a quite unremarkable observation that writing a story is, in its own right, a Hero’s Journey. Join me as I trace the Writer’s Journey over the course of composing a story… The writer, [...]

It’s called “argument by authority” and all the best rhetoricians frown on it. A bad argument, they say, is not improved by quoting an authoritative voice in support of it. A good buttress, you [...]

I’ve been wondering why conflict is that absolutely essential element of drama that we’ve always argued it is. We’ve said that conflict creates uncertainty, uncertainty creates suspense – will he [...]

We’ve had someone on our mentoring programme who has been struggling for months with a story, which just hasn’t been coming together. The main character didn’t ring true. We couldn’t understand [...]

I had a chat with a television production designer recently. This is the person who’s responsible for the look of a production, which includes the set design, and the dressing of those sets. She [...]

How has your name affected your life? I used to have a photographer friend who believed you could judge people on their names. “Their parents named them and then socialised them,” he would say. [...]

Characters need to be active participants in their own fate. This might sound like obvious advice but I’ve been reading a number of manuscripts recently in which events simply overtake the [...]