CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

The act of making something, we’re assuming, is the act of drawing something out of an ultimate Non Existence into some kind of Existence. Before you begin writing a story, this theory goes, there is no story. Whether quickly or slowly, consciously or unconsciously, something emerges into the light - perhaps beginning with some kind of vague polarity or dichotomy, resolving somehow into shapes and figures, moving in one direction or another. At least, that’s what myths te

If you’re a member of the Inner Circle Writers’ Group on Facebook, you will have observed that on most Mondays I have a slot called ‘Marketing Monday’ in which I encourage members to post links directly to their websites and books and so on. At the same time, I discourage members from doing this in the main group feed - there, any attempt to ‘sell’ to members is discouraged and usually not allowed. Why is this? I have commented on this in the group itself, but here’s a sl

Continuing from the earlier article 'Archetypes': The Shadow Protagonist This figure also appears across the whole range of fiction: he or she is like the protagonist, but with different choices made. Think Bentley Drummle and Orlick in Great Expectations; Darth Vader in Star Wars; Gollum in The Lord of the Rings; Mordred in the tales of Arthur. These are often the assistants of antagonists, lurking in the darkness like brutal versions of the hero or heroine. The Anta

In our ongoing series about Myth, we’ve already covered a lot of ground. But you might feel as though you’re climbing a few mountains before we reach the next plateau. Starting from Northrop Frye’s division of literature into the modes of myth, romance (by which he meant mediaeval-style epic stories), high mimetic (grand stories about kings and leaders), low mimetic (more ‘ordinary’ stories about more ‘ordinary’ people) and ironic (stories about the less-than-human), we hav

Continuing our series on the power of myth… It’s very easy to fall for the modern temptation to try to explain something from where we stand now, projecting backwards in time those concepts with which we are familiar in an effort to understand those things which came earlier or lie beneath the comfortable things that we think we know. But while that seems perfectly natural, and is certainly commonplace, it runs counter to the raw creative process itself, which appears to be

As a writer, especially as one who is pondering the self-publishing route, it can be enormously helpful to think of what you’re doing as a business. I don’t mean ‘business’ in the sense of a group of people looking at graphs and meeting constantly with accountants or making decisions in sterile rooms in tall buildings - I mean ‘business’ in the sense that you have a product which you’d like to offer to a group of customers (readers). You might not wish to walk too far down

If myth is poetry, and the purpose of myth is to explain, as directly and as potently as the myth-maker can, the origins of the world as we experience it, then what we often see in myths at first are strange and faceless forces at work, inhuman, vast and almost incomprehensible. In the creation myth most familiar to us, for example, things begin from first principles: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkne

It can often seem that nothing can redeem the great disasters that occur within our lives; yet there are always a few small things. When I was seven years old, I lived in bliss in a small town in South Yorkshire, on the edge of the magnificently bleak Peak District and the howling moors. My world was woven from happy family routines and bordered by the deep valley in which the town nestled - I rarely saw beyond the brink of its hills. For me, a mysterious ‘North’ lay over t

As I’m in the process at this writing of reading through dozens of submissions for several upcoming Clarendon House Publications anthologies, I am gearing myself up for the writing of the rejection letters that are an inevitable part of that process. This got me wondering whether or not there’s a better word for what actually happens. The world ‘rejection’ brings with it all kinds of unpleasant connotations. ‘Reject’ comes from late Middle English and originally from Latin