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“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]