CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

As a quick example, to show certain differences between writing styles, let’s take a look at an excerpt from Robert E. Howard’s tale of Conan the Barbarian, called 'The Thing in the Crypt', and part of The Sun Also Rises , by Ernest Hemingway.   Howard’s stories of Conan belonged to the genre known as ‘Sword and Sorcery’, which pretty much describes its nature completely. These were straightforward action stories featuring simple-minded warriors battling hideous creatures, wi

How well do you know your protagonist?   If your central characters are like many, you may have developed ideas about their desires, values, beliefs, and opinions. You may have even drawn up personal codes for them that dictate to some degree whether they are being ‘good’ people. If there is any one thing you can do as a writer, surely it is to establish who your main characters are, you might think.   The truth is, although this is common practice amongst writers, most of th

I think it’s peculiar that we read books usually long before we get to know anything about their authors. Sometimes we never find out anything significant about the person behind the story. In most cases, who the author is probably has little significance in the long run to the impact of the tale itself, and the biography of the author shouldn’t be the focus of a study of the story, but it still strikes me as odd that we are quite prepared to take on board entire manuscripts

It’s hard to recollect much about it now, and I was more or less unaware of it then, but for half of my life the future of the world lay under a nuclear shadow.   From the Allies development of the atomic bomb in 1945, and its subsequent acquisition by the Soviet Union soon afterwards, the entire planet was threatened by the prospect of being suddenly engulfed in a destruction so vast and so lasting that it made every previous conflict in history look totally insignificant. T

You can add value to stories in lots of different ways.   Let’s assume you’ve read my book How Stories Really Work  - shameless plug - and that you have your characters and plot sorted out so that the basic shape and flavour of the story is there. How else can you improve things?   1. Dialogue.   Conversations between characters can quickly become a writer’s fallback for exposition or plot development. As with most things, there’s a spectrum at work here: you can drop hints i

If you were to sit down right now and write, what would you write about?   For those of you who have a work ongoing, you might simply want to continue with the next scene or portion that needs writing; for those of you who harbour a desire to be a writer but who haven’t yet made it happen to any degree, you might sit there and ponder what to do until time sweeps the opportunity away. So for the moment, whether you are writing something already or haven’t started, put things a

Much of my experience as a writer, editor and publisher suggests that many people write out of a compulsion to do so. They may not write often (though they often wish that they could) and they may not write much (though they are usually desperate to write more) but the impulse to write seems to have a largely unconscious source. They simply feel that they ‘must’ write. Not being able to do so for whatever reason is a kind of pain to them.   It is as though, for many, there is

You will probably have read plenty of quotes along the line of ‘If you want to be a writer, you have to write.’ Right?   Stephen King said something of the sort and many others did too. The basic idea is that dreaming about being a writer is one thing, but actually doing it is something else. Sitting down in a chair and writing, though it can lead to a few problems, is far better than doing nothing at all. But there are things to watch out for on that route.   Budding authors