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However grand your story idea, however vivacious your characters, the success of any writing project always boils down to the sentences you write, and the words you use to do so. This is, of [...]

We met at La Piazza in St Paul’s Square, just a stone’s throw from the river, for coffee. The sun was shining. The crowds of people browsing for vegetables at the Saturday market, were dressed [...]

Frequently when we’re asked to assess someone’s manuscript, or help a writer brainstorm a story idea, we have to begin by stating a fundamental principle of fiction. It is, we say, a really bad [...]

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 [...]

On Page 382 of Colm Toibin’s The Magician, a biographical novel which takes as its subject the life of one of the twentieth century’s most revered writers, the German Thomas Mann, he has Mann say [...]

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 [...]

We have just spent five weeks cruising through Fen country in England in our narrowboat. Our route took us down the flight of locks from the Grand Union Canal to Northampton. The canal is not [...]