Creative Writing: Working with Mosaics

Creative Writing: Working with Mosaics

I thought you might like some gilded Art Nouveau flowers to brighten up this interminably long shortest month. I am so through with February. I’m desperate for some mad March wind to blast the grey away and shake the gold from the daffodils. In the meantime,...

Writing Fiction : The Perfect Beginning

I’ve just read the first two chapters of Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel Instructions for a Heatwave, an opening so exquisitely orchestrated that it has left me feeling every other writer should just pack up their things and go home. I’d be full...

Fiction Writing – Drawing on Your Own Experience

“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.” So says Stephen King in his own particular take on the old adage that you should write about what you know, drawing...

Creative Writing – How to Set Your Story in Time and Place

I’m just starting to work on a new writing project, so the setting of the story is very much on my mind. As a huge fan of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels, as well as classics like Wuthering Heights, I’m conscious of the powerful role that location can...
Finding a Frame for your Story

Finding a Frame for your Story

I took this picture just outside the Place Stanislas in Nancy, looking into what is said to be the most beautiful square in the whole of France. It was designed by Emmanuel Héré and lavishly embellished by Jean Lamour, whose wrought iron archway draws the eye into my...

Ghost Writing?

I went to visit my father’s grave yesterday. He is buried in a churchyard at the foot of the Cotswold escarpment, in a place that is haunted by memories: of my dad, of my son’s childhood which was spent in the village, of life as it used to be and is no...

The Spaces Between Words

We’re Borgen slaves in our house, gone into mourning now that the second series has finished. How I’ll make it through the year without my weekly dip into the lives of Danish Prime Minister Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and her soulful, straying...
In Praise of Criticism

In Praise of Criticism

Criticism stings; it hurts. Sometimes it makes you want to curl up into a ball, block your ears and go lah, lah, lah, lah, lah. It can feel as rejecting as someone slamming a door in your face, even this poor, rickety, broken thing. Yet criticism is one of the most...

Top Tips for Starting a Novel

I am – I think – on the threshold of starting my Next Major Work. If you detect a note of caution, it’s because I’m not absolutely certain that I’m ready to begin, even though I started making notes about possible ideas last May, so I’ve...

Cooking Sources

I’m reading Michael Plampin’s brand-new novel Illumination which is set in Paris in 1870 when the French capital was under siege by the Prussian army. It’s a riveting tale, with lots of surface glitter, made all the more interesting to me because...