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An article in the New York Times alerted me to an existential threat confronting all writers. It’s an artificial intelligence construct called ChatGPT. The NYT calls it “quite simply, the best [...]

“I’m in London in a hotel listening to a couple behind me about to embark on an affair. It’s very exciting. I noted him putting his wedding ring in his pocket in the elevator on the way back from [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The usual suspects are talking up The Power of the Dog as a likely Oscar winner, and Benedict Cumberbatch an Oscar favourite for his role as the cowboy Phil Burbank. For Jane Campion, whose The [...]

The most successful drama series of the year in the UK offers us a number of insights into the variety of means writers have at their disposal whenever they need to raise the stakes, heighten the [...]

There was, in Bedford in the UK, a curious institution called the Panacea Society. It was a millenarian religious group, founded in 1919 which followed the teachings of a nineteenth-century seer [...]

Here’s a decision that writers are frequently called on to make. It’s the choice between creating dramatic irony – in terms of which your protagonist remains ignorant of facts [...]

One of our mentoring participants has held us in suspense for roughly 70 000 words. (In tranches of 5 000 words a month, that’s quite some wait). I’m not going to tell you exactly what happens [...]

Here’s a lesson in restraint and suspense from that master of both, Michael Connelly: In Chapter 3 of his latest police procedural, The Late Show, which features a brand new protagonist, the [...]

You’ve read The Da Vinci Code and you know that one of the devices that Dan Brown uses to get his many millions of readers to become compulsive page turners is cliffhangers at the end of each of [...]