CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

As a writer, one of the unavoidable but often crippling costs has to do with getting work edited. This ranges from simply having someone read it and give constructive feedback, all the way through to developmental editing and help with writing query letters and blurbs...

Addressing some concerns:

Does ‘finding your theme(s)’ involve sitting in a corner catching up on all the newspapers and current events and working out what you think of everything?

Does it mean sleepless nights as you try to figure out the Meaning of Life (or at least,...

Here’s an interview I did with myself (well, there was no one else around and I was excited…) about the recently released gem, Welcome to Blekeleigh Court, by Samantha Hamilton, available at almost no good bookstores, which is why you’ll have to go here to get a paperb...

Fiction writers learn their letters as children like anyone else; then their word vocabulary expands rapidly during their early years in school until most of them become proficient readers.

Parallel to this conventional ladder of learning, something else is also being t...

Learn:

• what a story really is 

• what it is actually doing to and for you and other readers

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• the magnetic power that attracts readers even before the introduction of any character

• what the thing called a ‘character’ actually is, and how to ra...

You’ll often see in conventional writing advice the maxim that in order to learn how to be a better writer you have to write.

It makes sense, right? By writing more and more, you are practising techniques, skills, approaches, finding out what works and what doesn’t work...

We’re attempting to establish what you are trying to say through your fiction.

The purpose of this is to enhance and expand your work so that it is more likely to get published and reach a wider base of readers, and also so that it will appeal to those readers in more p...

So you want to boost the ‘quality of form’ in your story?

You want to progress towards a three-dimensional, more widely appealing and resonant piece of work, and further away from ‘Then this happened…’ linear storytelling?

Conventional writing advice suggests things like...

As a writer, one of the unavoidable but often crippling costs has to do with getting work edited. This ranges from simply having someone read it and give constructive feedback, all the way through to developmental editing and help with writing query letters and blurbs...

Conventional advice on how to write better fiction dwells on those well-worn items, character and plot. We’re supposed to have ‘fully developed characters’ (whatever that means) and ‘intriguing plots’ (‘intriguing’ is left intriguingly undefined) in order to grab reade...