CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

It’s hard to recollect much about it now, and I was more or less unaware of it then, but for half of my life the future of the world lay under a nuclear shadow.   From the Allies development of the atomic bomb in 1945, and its subsequent acquisition by the Soviet Union soon afterwards, the entire planet was threatened by the prospect of being suddenly engulfed in a destruction so vast and so lasting that it made every previous conflict in history look totally insignificant. T

You can add value to stories in lots of different ways.   Let’s assume you’ve read my book How Stories Really Work  - shameless plug - and that you have your characters and plot sorted out so that the basic shape and flavour of the story is there. How else can you improve things?   1. Dialogue.   Conversations between characters can quickly become a writer’s fallback for exposition or plot development. As with most things, there’s a spectrum at work here: you can drop hints i

If you were to sit down right now and write, what would you write about?   For those of you who have a work ongoing, you might simply want to continue with the next scene or portion that needs writing; for those of you who harbour a desire to be a writer but who haven’t yet made it happen to any degree, you might sit there and ponder what to do until time sweeps the opportunity away. So for the moment, whether you are writing something already or haven’t started, put things a

Much of my experience as a writer, editor and publisher suggests that many people write out of a compulsion to do so. They may not write often (though they often wish that they could) and they may not write much (though they are usually desperate to write more) but the impulse to write seems to have a largely unconscious source. They simply feel that they ‘must’ write. Not being able to do so for whatever reason is a kind of pain to them.   It is as though, for many, there is

You will probably have read plenty of quotes along the line of ‘If you want to be a writer, you have to write.’ Right?   Stephen King said something of the sort and many others did too. The basic idea is that dreaming about being a writer is one thing, but actually doing it is something else. Sitting down in a chair and writing, though it can lead to a few problems, is far better than doing nothing at all. But there are things to watch out for on that route.   Budding authors

If you are aiming to make a living as a writer, your success depends on your ability to produce a piece of writing - and probably many pieces of writing - that others want to read. Readers pay you for this work so you can live. Let's call this work your product.   The more impactful, popular and well-known your product is, the more money you earn. Becoming ‘well-known’ has to be part of it: no point in writing a masterpiece if no one has heard of it. It’s mind-boggling to im

There’s a lot of talk these days about the ‘freedom of the press’ and the power of the media. It’s probably even more important today to recognise what we are talking about in relation to these things than it ever has been.   We all seek meaning. As human beings, we are on a quest, knowingly or not, to find significance and shape in the events of our day. On a small scale, we try to put order into our immediate surroundings and day-to-day routines; on a larger scale we turn t

I’ve looked at what makes up a story, and what actually happens when a writer communicates something to a reader.   Put in basic, mechanical terms, we can imagine a writer forming a ball out of some kind of clay and hurling it across a space to a reader. For the ball to arrive at the reader successfully, we need a number of elements to work together: the ball needs to be aimed accurately; it needs sufficient impetus; and it has to hold together in flight. But it also needs to

As a writer, you probably have your ‘grand novel’ (or fantasy series, or family saga, or whatever) sitting either on a shelf, or in a hard drive, or still forming in your imagination somewhere. I think most writers have this to some degree: that ‘perfect’ and usually lengthy piece which one day they hope and imagine will be published and read by millions.   Writers then have a kind of angst about whether or not that work will actually ever get written, or, if it already exist