
12 Things That 'Captain America: The Winter Soldier' Gets Right
The ninth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe series of films, Captain America: The Winter Soldier earned $259.8 million in North...

'An Inspector Calls' - An Irony
The play An Inspector Calls, written by J. B. Priestley during the closing moments of the Second World War, premiered on 1 October 1946....


Marvels: Letters from an Elder, Part 22
Letter # 12, February 9th, 1949 continued 8. Solitude Most difficulties faced on the mortal plane stem from a longing for the kind of...

Learn what a story really is...
Learn: • what a story really is • what it is actually doing to and for you and other readers ​ • the magnetic power that attracts readers...


The Significance of 'The Ark in Space'
ABC TV in Australia must have had some kind of commercial relationship with the BBC, because periodically BBC programmes appeared and...

The Power of Tropes
As we have seen in How Stories Really Work, there are four basic genres, each growing out of the kind of effect a writer wants to produce...


What's the Point of English Literature?
At some point in teaching teenagers, usually just before or soon after you have entered the dreaded ’S’ subject (Shakespeare), someone in...

Learn what a story really is...
Learn: • what a story really is • what it is actually doing to and for you and other readers ​ • the magnetic power that attracts readers...

'Lies breathed through silver.'
Though it will probably be common knowledge to you reading this, it came as a strange shock to me when, during my early teens, I...


The Seven Pillars of Successful Fiction
1. Core Ideas At the heart of whatever it is you want to communicate as a writer, whether that’s a very definite idea that you want...