The Creative Writing Blog

'The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!'

Oscar Wilde.

If you're new to us, welcome to The...

Are you a plotter or a pantser? I'm both. I rely on the 'divine write' but I also have a cunning plan up my sleeve. Read on!

I have this crazy notion that I used to write novels without planning...

There comes a time when every writer has to face the awful thought that they may have to kill their manuscript.

 “Often when I sat down to work,” wrote Michael Chabon about a...

“I want to write something new - something extraordinarily beautiful and simple and intricately patterned."

That was The Great Gatsby, which Fitzgerald began in the wake of wild times...

Shame and Sacrifice.

The modern novel, when it's great, turns these sad old tricks beloved of its forbears.

When I was reading Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends, I was struck by the name of...

If you are a woman and you are a writer, you are not allowed to be angry.

If you feel angry about something and write with high feeling, you may be described, as a former agent once described...

Most 'big' books will have a theme and that's what I mean by politics.

This is not to say that theme belongs to a party-driven agenda - a book should not be in my opinion a vehicle for an organized...

 Women, Men & Other Clichés

 'I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.' Iris...

Sometime back in the 2000's 'literary' became a dirty word.

My first book was published in 2004. My work was hailed as 'the opposite of chick lit' but that was a double-edged sword ... 

I...

 At more than halfway through writing this novel, I pulled into the writer's layby to check tone of voice as I was worried that in the darker parts I'd let the humourous voice slip. (As you...

Philip Roth. Never mediocre.

Humbling, yet humble. A combination that made Philip Roth great.

His books were like knives we couldn’t put down despite them cutting our hands.

This is an...

There is one reason I write.

There is a reason I write and will always write until they take the pencil away from me.

The mystery.

The mystery of what’s going to happen on the...

'Why haven't you done anything with the book you wrote last year?' My son asked me.

'Because it's not important. I needed to write it but the world doesn't need it.'

'I would read it.'

'You can't...

Any tale of any kind told to humans by humans is and has ever been a morality tale.

'There was a man who... ' This person has a flaw, a failing, either moral (a tendency that will bring them and...