CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

In successful stories, there is a balance between Idea and Image, Reason and Imagination, Theme and Archetypes (or the symbolic representations of themes), Meaning and Form, Purpose and Shape, the Masculine and the Feminine.   In good stories, this balance is threatened by the antagonist. The threat represented by this character creates a core vacuum  which causes motion or action. This is called the Plot. It’s not often discussed in this way, but a plot in a story is a mecha

Every writer or potential writer is somewhere on a spectrum of writing.   The first level is an insatiable craving to write. This may run so deep that you are not even aware of it consciously, but it will be affecting you somehow. Your head will feel as though it is about to burst, but you may not be sure why. You may seek to distract yourself from this imminent explosion by plunging into various activities, but one day it will dawn on you that that fundamental urge which you

As you will have realised, if you have a product or service which is downloadable through the internet, you will find it easier to fill the customer’s major vacuums (needs) quicker and more completely.   Any time added into the process of bringing the customer and the product or service together is working against the entire purpose of your business.   If you run a pizza delivery service, of course, the customer and the pizza have to meet to achieve your business goal - but e

Whenever a business is not functioning well in terms of production, delivery, sales or profits, at the bottom of its difficulties will often be found a lack of basic data about the vacuum power of customer needs and its potential  as well as plenty of assumptions about producing things, servicing customers or marketing and selling which are undermining the success of the business.   It’s these assumptions which result in an inability to think with the basics of that business

At every point of your business, on every web page, in every store, on every visit, you need to have mechanisms for getting what customers wanted, how they wanted it and whether or not you provided it.   This can be in the form of questionnaires, feedback forms, post-service interviews, testimonials, surveys and so on.   If you immediately think, upon mention of the word 'survey', of people out on the streets with clipboards, or of potentially painful and time consuming effor

Ideas underpin any piece of fiction. They make the difference between the book that doesn’t get sold and the bestseller; they also make the difference between the bestseller that a couple of years later you find on the second-hand bookshelf, and the bestseller which is read again and again and made into box-office-shattering films.   Get the ideas right, and the rest will come much easier.   But what ideas? Do you just dream up some clever ideas and then hope for the best? No

If ideas form the centre of a successful piece of fiction, does it matter what those ideas are?   Should a writer just dream up any kind of idea, and, as long as it remains central to everything else in the story, will that guarantee success?   First we have to define what we mean by an ‘idea’. The dictionary can easily confuse us at this point. ‘Idea’ is defined as ‘a thought or suggestion as to a possible course of action’ but also as ‘a mental impression’ and ‘an opinion o

It is an understatement to say that your client database is probably an under-utilised resource. You have to decide what kind of resource you want your former customers to be. There are probably at least three kinds of activity that you can list:   1. No or very little activity. This is pretty close to what you probably have today with the vast majority of your previous customers. People buy stuff from you and go out into the community, and you hardly ever hear from most of t