CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

You have a few images come into your head.   With them, are some emotions or passions, connected to the images in ways that you don’t quite understand.   The combination is intoxicating, powerful enough to move you into a writing chair (sometimes) and to get you to try to capture what’s going on in your head as much as you can.   After a relatively short while, even if you feel confident enough with the language to get something down on the page or screen, you run out of ener

Putting aside for the moment the world of films and television, in which characters appear to us ‘ready made’ in the form of actors, have you ever noticed how, in most fiction, these people are rarely described in any detail by the author?   Take a look at some of the leading characters in fiction: Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice , Pip in Great Expectations, Scout in  To Kill a Mockingbird , Frodo in The Lord of the Rings , and many more, get nothing more than a me

What is it exactly that attracts readers?   Well-developed characters? An exciting plot? A thoroughly imagined world? Maybe - but when you really look at these things, they don’t answer the question. What do we mean by ‘well-developed’? How precisely is something made ‘exciting’? What’s the difference between ‘thoroughly imagined’ and just ‘imagined’?   To really understand how to attract readers, we have to understand what  is being attracted and how  that is being done.   T

Writing can be an addiction.   Many writers yearn for, hunger for, thirst for the time when they can sit down and write, in the same way that others might crave the release that they find from a drug. This isn’t so much an escape from the grim reality surrounding them (though that enters into it too) but a desire for a particular state which writing can bring on.   How to describe that state? It’s a kind of dream, a sort of reverie or trance, in which the commonplace, hard, p

I went through a phase in trying to market my books and services where I thought I was invisible.   In attempting to get my material known to a wider public, I was using social media in what I thought was a sensible way to contact people who undoubtedly needed what I had to offer - all I needed to do, I thought, was to place a reasonable ad in front of a few thousand people and they would immediately click on the ad and be taken through to my website. Not all of them would bu

If we track back to see how any kind of writing begins, it’s fairly obvious that before the pen touches the page, or the finger touches the keyboard, there must be an idea .   If we accept that as our starting point, then it must also be reasonably clear that, based on the strength of that idea, writing will either occur or not, and also will be of a certain character or not. If the idea is weak - and it is possible to define more or less precisely what we mean by ‘weakness’,

If you are in any way an entrepreneur or are hoping to make an online business work for you and your customers, you will know the scenario - you are scrolling through your newsfeed and up pops an ‘exciting new webinar’ on a topic that you’re interested in. You have to sign up for it; you’re presented with a number of ‘time zone options’; and you get bombarded with messages like ‘Reserve your seat now!’, ‘Only a Few Places Left!’ and so on. At this webinar, you’re assured by a

In putting together a wholly new approach to creative writing, fiction and literature, I have tried not to invent an entirely new nomenclature for the subject. Where possible, I have used ordinary words which communicate independently, without necessarily requiring any knowledge of the wider framework of the subject - so, for example, the word ‘vacuum’ conveys something to the reader quite apart from its specialist meaning in relation to what makes up character or a plot. The

Marketing is commonly seen in two ways.   Both are highly damaging to any business.   Radical statement?   Well, let’s take a look at the two ways:   1. Most business people see marketing as an activity in which the products or services of the business are pumped out into the marketplace in the hope of attracting customers. To do this, businesses run ad campaigns, social media campaigns, have billboards, work on branding and basically try every way they can think of of gettin