Would You Rather Be the Passenger, or the Pilot?

There's a lot you can control in life, and a lot that you can't. In the current publishing environment, as the writer's slic...

The Will to Write: If In Doubt, Fake It!

It's all too easy for one's early enthusiasm to wilt long before completing a novel. There really isn't any easy way through th...

While I was in Oxford recently, I dropped into The Story Museum to hear Philip Pullman read the opening chapters of one of my favouri...

During a recent masterclass with David Almond in London he gave us a number of writing prompts—one after the other in quick succession, t...

My reading taste is all over the place at the moment, all of it related in some way to the book I'm writing. There's Lord of the...

One of the most basic tenets of humanity is that people do things for a reason. That's why readers don’t want to hear that characters ...

It wouldn't matter what I did to pay the bills, I would still have to say, "I'm a writer" if asked at a cocktail party. ...

"On a remote island in Orkney, a curiously-matched couple arrive on their honeymoon. He is an eminent literature professor; she was ...

When it comes to battling inner voices, there's no contest. My inner voices win every damn time. "You'll never finish this ...

Sometimes you have to take radical action to deal with an impasse in the writing process. For some that may involve long walks, hypnoth...