CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

Thirty-five years ago - a length of time which is shocking to me, stated bluntly like that - I was working hard to save up the money to return to England from a prior quarter of a century in Australia. In order to do this, I was labouring at several jobs and trying to make maximum use of every hour in the day.   One of these jobs was as an office cleaner, and one of the premises I ended up cleaning was a place called the Writers’ Association in Adelaide, South Australia. The

Writers want to make money from what they do. We all want to make money from what we do.   Why?   That might sound like a silly question, but here’s a train of thought which you might find interesting in relation to the topic of money.   In the days before money, when human beings lived in small agricultural communities, individuals worked with their families and other members of the group to serve each others’ needs. Some hunted for food, some grew food, some were in charge

I thought I’d put together a guide as to how to I operate as an editor. Not everyone works this way, and there will be some editors who will protest my approach, but I’ve been working this way now for about 35 years in one way or another, and have always had amazing results, so chances are this is the way I’ll continue to work.   1. I try not to tell the writer a better way of achieving the effect he or she is attempting to create or tell him what he or she should think about

In the process of maturing as a writer, an individual will progress through certain distinct stages.   At first, a writer may be frustrated to feel that all of his or her writing is largely derivative: ideas depend very much for their power on the ideas of others; characters can be almost like clones of another author’s; plots can drift into being carbon-copies of plots that have been well done elsewhere. Even a writing style, when examined coldly in retrospect, can be seen t

There may be things we can learn from the wonderful world of comics when it comes to putting a story together. Comics obviously use both a plotter and an artist - though sometimes these are the same person - but the way that these two aspects of a story can work together can serve to illustrate certain things about a piece of fiction which we might not be able to grasp in any other way.   The classic method of producing a comic book story, as used by DC Comics for decades, st

There used to be a short segment on Australian television in the 1960s and 70s called ‘Why Is It So?’ It featured an eccentric scientist, Professor Julius Sumner Miller, presenting simple physics experiments to a live audience of children. I didn’t pay that much attention, except to Sumner Miller’s sometimes odd remarks or caustic wit, but the question contained in the programme’s title stayed with me: why wasn’t it phrased as ‘Why It Is So’ - a statement? Why did we have to

I recently had some correspondence with a wannabe writer who was discouraged, to say the least, by some feedback that he’d received from an editor. ‘Dazed and confused’ might be closer to the mark.   He had sent off a manuscript that he’d been working on for some time and which was approaching, he thought, the stage at which he might dare to send it off to possible publishers. But, like many writers in his position, he had yet to receive any kind of input from anyone other th

Where do your fellow writers hang out?   It’s much easier these days to establish communication with other writers. I remember back in the 90s, before the internet, when I was a member of a writers’ group in London. There were about eight of us, usually. We met once a fortnight, for a while at a central location, and then for a further period in each others’ homes. In either case, we had to travel, determinedly, no matter what the weather or how tired we were, usually using p