CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

It can often seem that nothing can redeem the great disasters that occur within our lives; yet there are always a few small things.   When I was seven years old, I lived in bliss in a small town in South Yorkshire, on the edge of the magnificently bleak Peak District and the howling moors. My world was woven from happy family routines and bordered by the deep valley in which the town nestled - I rarely saw beyond the brink of its hills. For me, a mysterious ‘North’ lay over t

As I’m in the process at this writing of reading through dozens of submissions for several upcoming Clarendon House Publications anthologies, I am gearing myself up for the writing of the rejection letters that are an inevitable part of that process.   This got me wondering whether or not there’s a better word for what actually happens. The world ‘rejection’ brings with it all kinds of unpleasant connotations. ‘Reject’ comes from late Middle English and originally from Latin

In the last article in this series , we attempted to examine the Norse myth of creation as a story or piece of poetry, to see what emotional and spiritual value it had for us as modern readers without devaluing it as a myth, a ‘core story’, a collection of images and ideas which were and are an effort to capture basic truths about Life.   It wasn’t easy. The World Tree Yggdrasil was just about comprehensible as an image of the mysterious, interlinked and untranslatable essenc

A story works because it resonates with fundamental psychological and spiritual realities that remain true, active and potent today, right now, for any reader. That’s what I asserted in Part One of this series. And it applies to whatever type of story we are talking about, from ancient myths through to modern day Ironies. The exact elements that ‘resonate’ can be grasped, understood and communicated, if we approach them in the right frame of mind.   However, getting into that

I’ve written elsewhere about Canadian academic Northrop Frye  and his work on understanding how fiction operates. I believe this to be some of the most startling and important research into our subject of writing fiction that has ever been done, and many of his ideas either underpin or parallel what I’ve outlined in my book How Stories Really Work .   Starting from the viewpoint that works of fiction may be classified according to the power of action possessed by their protag

If you want to generate a blog post for every day of the week for an undefined period, you might occasionally find yourself in need of some prompting.   Here are some ideas to get you started (most of which I have used myself):   1. Review something else in your field, especially from other writers on the topic you’ve chosen to blog about.   2. Tell a true story about something that happened to you or a client of yours.   3. Write about the research you did to ensure that som

I had occasion recently to revisit the Amazon page for my book How Stories Really Work , published ten years ago now. I was pleasanly surprised by the number of rave reviews - even the 'one star' review is a five star review in disguise! Here's a selection:   I first discovered Grant Hudson when I read a blog post he wrote and was impressed enough to investigate his books. They were new and lacked reviews. They were also expensive. But the premise of "How Stories Really Work"

You’ve probably heard it said that writers these days need something called an ‘author platform’.   But what exactly is an author platform? A dais to stand on when talking about your book? Part of a railway station? A raised shoe? We need to take it seriously, though, because without an author platform you will tend to struggle - we just have to know what one is and how to create it.   An author platform breaks down into the following components: your persona (a mix of your ‘

As I write this, I’m approaching my four thousandth blog post. That’s about ten years of daily blog posts. That's around 4 million words. And, following the methodology described earlier, I have no concerns about generating several thousand more items.   But what are the benefits of all this work?   Here are a few I could think of:   1. Though I said earlier that a daily blog on its own is not likely to grab people’s attention, a daily blog as part of a set of tools is a powe