CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

I once worked as a management consultant in the heart of London. I had an office just off Berkeley Square in Mayfair, and would occasionally take clients for tea at the Ritz Hotel just down the road. I remember walking across Green Park one spring day - the trees were turning green, the deckchairs were out, and I was on my way to an interview with the BBC regarding a programme that I was involved with which wanted to introduce a post-communist Russia to principles of manageme

I recently did a survey of writers, asking them what their biggest challenge was in relation to their writing. A few answered that they were struggling with marketing, or with story quality or self doubt or even grammar. Each of these categories amounted to 5% or 10% of the total answers. But by far the largest proportion of writers - over 60% - revealed that their main difficulty was related to two connected things: time and procrastination. These writers told me that th

Continuing with our analogy between narrative points of view in fiction and a football match, we can see that, once we step off the pitch, quite a bit changes. While taking the point of view of the ball, we were following the game from a single viewpoint but one which was very much at the receiving end of the action, bounced to and fro and hardly able to put anything in context. This relates to the stream of consciousness writing style, in which the emphasis is on the inter

Carrying on with our football analogy from earlier, we saw that what is called ‘stream of consciousness’ in fiction would be similar to taking the point of view of the ball in a match - the viewpoint would be thrown around, apparently at random, with an intimate knowledge only of its own experiences and not much idea of anything else. If we step back from the ball and take on the viewpoint of an individual football player, we can compare that fruitfully to what is known as

* for American readers, the ‘football’ to which this article refers is the original English game, which you know as ‘soccer’ - though the principles described herein apply to just about any later variation of the game. A few years ago, I was pleased to be able to fulfil one of my life’s dreams which was to attend a professional Premier League football game in England. A former student of mine had arranged tickets, and we sat high up in the stands, from where I was able to

How do you build affinity with anyone? Well, it usually begins with finding something in common - either a working background, or some kind of common interest or passion. It can develop further when you find out more about an individual’s personal life, their preferences, tastes, foibles, habits and so on. Spotting what it is that you like or admire among these more intimate things is a kind of treasure hunt - you follow a trail, finding more and more about a person with

Earlier, we established (I hope) that, out of the two kinds of relationship that exist between people - the intimate and personal relationships that we have with family, friends and the like, and the less intimate and commercial relationships we have with elements in society at large - the relationship between the writer and the reader belongs more in the first category, and that the fact that a commercial transaction must take place in order for readers to access writers’ wo

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of people in our lives: those with whom we have close relationships based on family affection, friendship, romantic attachment or care, and those whose relationship to us is commercially based. When we buy car insurance or a pizza, for example, we converse with people with whom we have probably never met and the substance of our interaction is the transaction in which we hand over money in exchange for a product or a service. We don’t u

How do you find your ideal readers? You start by listing out the characteristics, as far as you can describe them, of your ideal readership. Why would they like your work? What exactly would attract them to it? What else do they like that’s similar in some way to your work? And, crucially, are there places where these types of readers ‘hang out’? Magazines that they read? Groups they might belong to? Other purchases that they may have made? There are a lot more questions