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In the last article in this series, we pictured writing as the practice of digging attention-controlling channels to guide your readers towards the protagonist, along the line of the plot and then finally to the great ‘lake of fulfilment’ where the story achieves its success in the hearts of readers. For more about the craft of writing, please see the book How Stories Really Work .   In the earlier article, we weren’t looking at the craft of writing particularly - we were loo

Most writers see ‘marketing’ as a distinct activity. You finish your book, you go through the rigmarole of editing, and you get it out there into the marketplace. Job done.   In fact, unless you are working closely with a traditional publisher - and in many cases these days, even if you are - your job is far from over.   It goes like this: you have an idea for a story. You are driven by that idea and the images that go with it to eventually sit down and extract from yourself

I’ve read a lot lately about morality in art. You might have seen the same kind of thing, especially with the current wave of allegations against senior figures in the entertainment industry. Corruption, crime and immorality should be shunned and cast out wherever it is found. The issue of how this affects art has been around for much longer though: it’s the question of to what degree should we modify our views about a work of art (including a performance) based upon what we

A writer faces many problems.   Firstly, there are the logistical problems involved in getting to spend enough time writing. Sitting in front of a computer or in a chair with a pad and pen doesn’t pay the bills of itself - the demands of life can pull a writer’s attention all over the place until the possibility of actually getting anything written often drowns in the noise.   Even when the external logistics are conquered, there are internal barriers: self-doubt, self-critic

Characters ‘taking on a life of their own’ is a refrain I have heard from both amateur and professional writers. Even highly experienced writers have commented on occasion that a particular character has taken them in an unexpected direction in a story they were writing.   What’s happening here?   To some extent, the whole idea that a character ‘comes alive’ and does things of his or her own accord plays into the myth that a character in fiction is a kind of living being, and

You have only to spend a short amount of time with writers, perhaps in writers’ groups or personally, to realise that most of them are terrified of criticism. Sometimes, they are so full of fear that they haven’t even admitted to themselves that they are writers, and the thoughts that they scribble down in their own time are not considered to be potential works of fiction for others to read, but a kind of therapy, inwardly directed, never to be viewed by another.   It’s a hug

Just as Tolkien used the entire mythos of Middle-earth to assist him in processing what he had witnessed in the First World War and in his life overall, many writers use their writing as a kind of therapy or way of addressing deep, partly-glimpsed concerns about the world.   I’m not suggesting that anyone’s writing is necessarily a form of psychoanalysis. My own view is that, as well as an ‘unconscious mind’, we have a higher level of mental function which I’ll term a ‘super-

Horror stories belong in the Irony quadrant of my genre circle, as outlined in my book How Stories Really Work .   Irony - and its subset horror - draw their power from two main sources:   1. The expectations arising from the conventional tropes of the Epic genre, in which events are presented as real and external and the subjective state of the characters (and thus of the audience) is less a focus than the outward action and movement of the story. Epics place a great emphasi