5 Tips to Boost Your Confidence as a Writer
Writing fiction is a wonderful but delicate thing. We need a certain amount of confidence in order to be able to spend time putting what...
What is Father Christmas doing in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?
What is Father Christmas doing in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe ? Â Why do Silenus, satyrs (fauns) and other creatures from...
Successful Marketing Capmpaigns Part 2
Continuing our series on why certain marketing campaigns worked:  De Beers: A Diamond is Forever  In 1999, the magazine AdAge claimed...
Successful Marketing Campaigns Part 1
Some of these campaigns are not so recent. But in each case they struck home. Â A successful campaign is one which creates a motion...
The Antagonist Test
Is there anyone in your story who has the following attributes most of the time?  • The person portrays himself or herself as...
The Refusal to Change
Protagonists grow and change, learn and develop: the story is the soil in which they do this. They are the part of the tree which is...
'Being' versus 'Doing'
Some writers ask me ‘What’s the difference between the action and plot of a novel and its ideas or theme?’  In the terms described at...
Nuanced Thought and Binary Thought in Stories
In some Epics, one inhabits a binary world - good/bad, right/wrong, black/white etc. There are two ways out: the first way (the Old...
Signposts in Fiction
Have you ever read a book which, in the first few pages, fails to make it clear enough whose point of view in the story you should be...