CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

Another name that pops up in writing groups on social media is that of Gary Bonn. Many of us read quite a few short stories in the course of a month or so, and they are often exciting, well-crafted pieces with an emotional ‘punch’ at the end. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with these kind of tales, which make up the backbone of the short story world whether they are happy stories of romance, grim adventures with sad endings, or tragic episodes in the lives of interesting

There are times as a writer which are joyous in the extreme. In ways which are often hard to describe to a non-writer, the act of writing can take one into a different world - not a fantasy construction like Middle-earth (though that happens too) but a kind of trance in which reality seems not less solid but in some strange way more real. When we are ‘in the zone’ as writers, it is as though we have engaged some other set of perceptions and are able to make connections whic

I have seen quite a few conversations on the web over time in which the process of editing is questioned and most often misunderstood, so I thought I’d offer you some insights into the way editing should be done and the way I do it. First of all, we’d better define what is meant by the term ‘editing’. When I’m talking about editing here, I don’t mean the simple correction of language which comes under the title of 'line editing' or even ‘proofreading’ - that’s almost entire

I’ve always liked simplicity. To me, when examining any area in any detail, if my mind is asking questions such as ‘But why is this so?’ or ‘How does this work?’ then I haven’t gotten to the bottom of something. In addressing the subject of Myth and its role in fiction one inevitably encounters the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces by American mythologist Joseph Campbell. First published in 1949, it is a work of comparative mythology in which Campbell discusses his the

You’ve probably heard the term ‘author platform’. You may not be quite sure what it means. Part of the reason that it is hard to define is that there are various definitions out there. The closest applicable definition of the word ‘platform’ in a dictionary might be ‘a raised floor or stage used by public speakers or performers so that they can be seen by their audience’. The word itself comes from French plateforme meaning ‘ground plan’. What we are talking about with the te

I’ve written extensively about creativity in the past in relation to education in particular, but here I’m going to adapt one of those earlier articles to specifically address creativity in writing. The subject of creativity is surrounded by so much mystery and there is so much advice out there about how to be creative that it is easy to get overwhelmed by the whole topic. Too often writers fall into the following traps: a) They conclude that their favourite author has un

I’ve written a whole book about helping children to read. More than just getting them to read, though, the idea is to help them to enjoy reading. The basics of this article are taken from that book and you may find that they apply more widely than to children alone. 1. Keep Calm Children move at different paces and shift gears all the time. One child may have a natural proclivity for music for a few weeks and then lose interest; another may avidly grab for books for month

Surrounded by an Ironic culture in which many denizens of both Oxford and Cambridge had been swayed by modernism, secularism and even communism, C. S. Lewis had abandoned his childhood Christian faith and become a materialist. But, like T. S. Eliot later, he was to undergo a personal ‘eucatastrophe’ which was to affect the culture of the Twentieth Century. During my early teens, I discovered that C. S. Lewis, author of one of my favourite books The Lion, the Witch and the W

I’ve written elsewhere about a survey I did a few years ago with a class of 13 year olds and how it revealed some interesting things. One was that almost no one in the class had a particular space set up for doing homework in the evenings or on weekends. One boy, who lived on a narrow barge with his parents, used a foldable table which he had to clear and lift up whenever anyone else in the boat wanted to move from one end to the other! The most usual situation was that chi