Do some moves!

As my regular readers will know I am very interested in the process of writing. But instead of banging on about the importance of story structure, character motivation and pace, today I am more concerned with the actual physical process of sitting down for the length...

My little brain devil

I wonder if there’s a novelist out there somewhere who doesn’t occasionally (or more than occasionally) suffer for their craft? It’s so easy being a reader. You just read. Of course, if you have the energy, you can do a bit of thinking too, have a bash at guessing the...

It’s all one big magic trick

I was delighted to see that 22 year old Megan Knowles-Bacon has just become the first female officer of the Magic Circle. I have recently developed an interest in magic myself. Not in performing it, I hasten to say, but in watching it and in analysing its techniques....

Too many choices?

There are so many choices involved in writing a novel. Too many for comfort. What time period? What setting? What structure? What genre? What characters? Where do they live? What is their past life? What motivates them? What events? How true should it be to real...

Why do people write novels?

By any standard writing a novel is a long hard grind. Despite popular opinion, very few novelists ever hit the real mega buck level (many don’t hit any buck level at all). But yet judging from the plethora of wannabe novelists on Twitter and Facebook, it appears that...