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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

Earlier I talked about setting up a daily blog. Let's assume that you have followed the advice given and that you have a blog. You’re writing material and getting daily items posted. What happens next? The truth is that a blog post, sitting out in cyberspace alone, is not likely to attract much attention. As I explained earlier, a daily blog post in itself will not particularly serve to attract a public. All your hard work, and the fact that you haven’t missed a day for m

So you want to write a blog, maybe every day, and get you and what you do known across the world instantly? Blogging sounds like a really fabulous idea. All you have to do is write content directly into the internet and soon you’ll have a vast following and a channel to so many people with whom you can be friends or out of whom you can make customers. What’s so hard about that? The internet is indeed a wonderful thing and it has empowered individuals in ways never before

A good place to begin when looking at the effects that a story is having on you as a reader is to understand the four basic genres of storytelling. These are Epic (which contains the vast majority of fiction created by the human race, with its generally happy endings), Tragedy (a fall from grace, ending in death), Irony (a twisted version of an Epic, in which usual expectations are turned on their heads) and Comedy (which usually ends with a marriage or reunion of some kind).

Have you ever experienced the phenomenon whereby you are rolling along, doing what you are doing with a clean heart and a good intention, and then suddenly (and it’s usually sudden and unexpected) someone comes along and brutally attacks you for no apparent reason, verbally accusing you of all kinds of crimes which have never entered your head, let alone made it through you into any sort of action? It can knock you for six (as we say in England), can’t it? Sometimes an at

In an earlier article , we examined how Steven Carr, as a master of Irony, often tends to mesmerise the reader into a false sense of security, subverting it with an unexpected ending. This is one of the features of Irony as one of the four basic genres, the other genres being Epic (where the bulk of fiction has its home), Tragedy and Comedy - Irony ‘tricks’ the reader and usually leaves him or her feeling introverted, lost, thoughtful or even depressed. But there are other fe