A Checklist for Boosting Your Morale as a Writer
There are 168 hours in a week. You probably spend about 60 of them asleep. That leaves 108 hours, from which we will remove a further 50...
6 Things to Remove from Your Story
Your job as an author is to remove yourself from the story completely. But you do this by progressively removing a number of other...
The Path To Be Walked
Inspecting a manuscript at the beginning of its evolution one ordinarily finds many problematic areas about which the author feels...
The Basic Principles of Editing
In practice, good editors are doing a very simple thing: they are recovering an author’s true potential from within a work where it has...
Ideas Underpin Your Fiction
Ideas underpin any piece of fiction. They make the difference between the book that doesn’t get sold and the bestseller; they also make...
Telling a Story
If you sat down by a fireside with a good friend on a winter’s evening to tell that friend a story that you felt was deeply important,...
Six Strategies to Emotionally Survive as a Writer
Surviving as a writer is not just about working hard - you have to work smart. ‘You have to do more’ is not as workable as ‘You have to...
Prospecting for Gold
I wrote earlier of the similarities between teaching and coal-mining. In this article, a close adaptation of that earlier one, you’ll be...
The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde
In many ways, Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is an early example of an Irony, a precursor...
'All Shall Be Well' - the Conclusion of 'Little Gidding'
As previously discussed, poetry lies at one end of a spectrum: poems are by definition highly precise, usually much shorter,...