CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

It wasn’t until I became a parent quite late in life that I began to observe closely some things to do with children that apply more widely to the behaviour of human beings, and particularly to writers.   I noticed with my young daughter how she was always in the ‘Now’, always relishing the moment, always keen to have things happen straight away. She went through a period when she was about three years old of simply not understanding, and totally rejecting, anything to do wit

As many readers will know, I’ve written a book, Marketing for Writers , which goes into some depth and detail about what marketing is, how it works, and how, as writers, we can get the upper hand on its principles and use them to market our books.   Part of what the book tackles is the myths about marketing that are so all-pervasive that we believe them implicitly to be true. These things seem obvious to us, and for me to question them in any way seems, at first glance, to be

What are your goals and purposes as a writer?   That’s if we define ‘goal’ as ‘the object of a person's ambition or effort; an aim or desired result’, and ‘purpose’ as ‘the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists’.   Thus you might have a goal to ‘be living as an independently wealthy person on the proceeds of my writing’; or ‘To experience relief from personal psychological pressure’. And while that might be a part of your purpose - i.e. t

One of the things I most often run into when helping writers with their stories is that the writer thinks that he or she has finished a manuscript when what they have in front of them is more like a wardrobe of clothes, or a net from which most of the fish have escaped.   This will probably take some explanation, as, while it’s a simple concept, it’s something that some writers have real trouble grasping. Perhaps we can begin with a quote from C. S. Lewis, who, as the author

I don’t recall ever suffering from ‘writer’s block’, in the same way that I don’t think I’ve been bored since I was about 7. There always seems to be too much to do, and certainly too much to write about. But I’ve observed plenty of this phenomenon in others and studied the matter. So here I offer some suggested remedies for the situation in which you simply hit a ‘wall’ and cannot move forward with a piece of writing. Most of these remedies can be found in some form elsewher

I’m not a big fan of horror stories or of the horror genre. My thinking is that the world is a frightening and horrible enough place without adding to it. Master authors like Dickens, with his masterpiece short story ‘The Signalman’ or Thomas Hardy and his chilling Wessex tale ‘The Withered Arm’ turn the genre into a joy to read because of their mastery of storytelling, but the horrific for its own sake? Not for me.   Having said that, though, I haven’t yet encountered a stor

There’s at least one myth that we all grow up with that becomes so intertwined with our lives that we have difficulty seeing it as a myth at all.   I’m talking about the myth of the many and the few.   We go to school, and from the first year a process called ‘teaching’ begins. This is the laying out before a class of children particular sets of data which the society, through government or local authorities or some other means, decides that children need to learn. In the beg

I just finished rewatching Serenity  again for the umpteenth time. This is the 2005 American space Western film written and directed by Joss Whedon in his feature directorial debut. It’s a continuation of Whedon's short-lived 2002 Fox television series Firefly, of which I have never seen an episode - but that doesn’t matter. Serenity  immediately returns to my (ever-shifting) list of top ten films. Set in 2517, the story follows the crew of Serenity, a "Firefly-class" spacesh

I was never a ‘party person’. The idea of appearing on stage in any kind of show or taking part in anything remotely theatrical was repellent to me. Apart from developing a reputation as a public speaker by accident (related in an earlier blog article) I have managed to avoid such events for the most part. On one occasion though, again by accident, my role-playing became real in an unexpected way.   A fancy dress party with a historical theme was to be held at a remote locati